I 



NINE SERMONS, 



OK THE 

NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 

BT WHICH 

Clje JFact of our JLorD'is fSitmmction 

IS ESTABLISHED; 

AND 

ON VARIOUS OTHER SUBJECTS. 



TO WHICH IS PREFIXED, 

A DISSERTATION 

ON THE PROPHECIES OF THE MESSIAH DISPERSED 
AMONG THE HEATHEN. 



By SAMUEL HORSLEY, LL.D. F.R.S, F.A.S. 

LATE LORD BISHOP OF ST. ASAPH. 



THIRD EDITION. 



LONDON: 

PUINTED FOR LONGISIAN, HURST, REES, ORME, AND BROWN, 

FATEUNOSTER-ROW ; AND 

F. C. AND J. RIVINGTON, ST. PAUf/S CHURCH-VARD. 
1822. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The Dissertation which stands 
first in the following* pages was 
evidently written in connection 
with the three Discourses on the 
Faith of the Samaritans, published 
in the second volume of Bishop 
Horsley's Sermons ; and appears 
by the form of compilation to 
have been, like them, originally 
delivered from the Pulpit. 

It came into the Editor's hands 
in loose and unconnected sheets, 
and these were not arrang-ed and 



vi 



examined by him till long after 
the publication of the two first 
volumes of Sermons. After he 
had examined them, he found 
them to contain an unfinished 
Essay, which evidently had never 
been prepared by the Author for 
the press. He therefore laid it 
aside. But having shown it, 
during his stay in London, in the 
month of May last, to some lite- 

ml 

rary friends, he was strongly ad- 
vised to publish it ; for though 
confessedly an incomplete work, 
yet it was deemed worthy of 
publication, as displaying the 
Bishop's thoughts on an impor- 
tant subject. 



Vll 

In this opinion he anxiously 
hopes the Kterary world in gene- 
ral may be disposed to agree. But 
if not, let it be remembered, that 
the blame of publication (if there 
be any) rests with the Editor, not 
the Author ; for it is again re- 
peated, that the Manuscript was 
not left in that state in which the 
latter, had he been living, would 
have published it : Indeed a note 
found in one of the pages of the 
Manuscript expressly states, that 
it was the Author's intention to 
have revised it. 

To the Dissertation the Editor 
has added nine hitherto unpub- 
lished Sermons, collected and ar- 



Vlll 

ranged from scattered and muti- 
lated Manuscripts ; but which, 
m his opinion, now that they are 
arranged, display the same vigour 
of thought, and the same masterly 
powers of expounding Scripture, 
as characterize bis Father's other 
Theological Works. 



CONTENTS. 



A Dissertation on the Prophecies of the 
Messiah dispersed among the Heathen, Page 1 



Four Discourses on the Nature of the Evi- 
dence by which the fact of our Lord's 
Resurrection is established. 



DISCOURSE I. 

Acts, x. 40, 4 1 . — "//m God raised up the third 
" day^ and showed him openly ; not to all the 
" people^ but to witnesses chosen before of God" 121 

DISCOURSE II. 

Acts, x. 40, 4 1 . — " Hi7n God raised up the third 
. " dayy and showed him openly ; not to all the 
" people^ hut to witnesses chosen before of God^ 146 



X 



DISCOURSE IIL 

Acts, x. 40, 41. — " Him God raised up the 
" third day, and shoisoed him openly ; not to 
all the peojjle, But to witnesses chosen before 
''of God:' - - - . Page 169 

DISCOURSE IV. 

Acts, x. 40, 41. — " Him God raised up the 
" third day, and shoisied him openly ; not to 
" all the people, hut to witnesses chosen before 
''of God." - - - - - 193 



FIVE SERMONS. 

SERMON I. 
Psalms, xcvii. 7. — " Worship him all ye gods " . 223 

SERMON II. 

Romans, iv. 25. — " Who was delivered for our 
" offences, and was raised again for ourjusti- 
" fcation:' - 249 



xi 



SERMON III. 

Matthew, xx. 23. — " To sit on my right hand 
" and my left is not mine to give^ but it shall 
*' be given to them for "isohom it is ptepared of 
''my Father:* ... Page 281 

SERMON IV. 

Ephesians, iv. 30. — " And grieve not the Holy 
" Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto 
" the day of redemption^* , - • 302 

SERMON V. 

Ephesians, iv. 30. — " And grieve 7iot the Holy 
" Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto 
" the day of redemption^* - - - 328 



DISSERTATION 

ON THE 

PROPHECIES OF THE MESSIAH 

DISPERSED 

AMONG THE HEATHEN. 



B 



A 



DISSERTATION, 



The expectation of an extraordinary per- 
son who should arise in Judea, and be the 
instrument of great improvements in the 
manners ^nd condition of mankind, was 
almost if not altogether universal at the 
time of our Saviour's birth ; and had been 
gradually spreading and getting strength 
for some time before it^ The fact is so 
notorious to all who have any knowledge 
of antiquity, that it is needless to attempt 

B 2 



4 



any proof of it. It may be assumed as a 
principle, which even an infidel of candour 
would be ashamed to deny ; or if any one 
would deny it, I would decline all dispute 
with such an adversary, as too ignorant to 
receive conviction, or too disingenuous to 
acknowledge what he must secretly admit. 

If we inquire what were the general 
grounds of the expectation which so gene- 
rally prevailed, the answer to the question 
is exceedingly obvious : That the ground 
of this expectation was probably some 
traditional obscure remembrance of the 
original promises. But the great point is, 
to discover by what means this remem- 
brance was perpetuated in the latter and 
darker ages of idolatry, when the name of 
Jehovah was forgotten, and his worship 
neglected, except in one nation, in which 
the knowledge and worship of the invisible 
Creator was miraculously preserved. 



5 



Now, my conjecture is, that this wa^ 
effected by a collection of very early pro- 
phecies, which were committed to writing 
in a very early age, and were actually ex- 
isting in many parts of the world, though 
little known till the extirpation of Pagan- 
ism, by the propagation of the Gospel. I 
am well aware how extravagant such an 
opinion may appear in this incredulous 
age. But 1 stand not in the judgment of 
infidels ; I speak to a Christian audience. 
They will judge of the probability of my 
assertion, when I have stated the grounds^ 
on which I build it. 

For the more perspicuous arrangement 
of my argument, I shall divide it into two 
parts: — 

First, I shall prove the fact from histori- 
cal evidence, that the Gentile world in the 
darkest ages was in possession, not of 
vague and traditional, but of explicit writ- 

B 3 



6 



ten prophecies of Christ. When I have 
estabhshed the fact, and by that means 
shown the immediate cause of the expec- 
tation which so generally prevailed, I shall 
then produce the more remote and higher 
cause, and prove that these written prophe- 
cies were the remains of divine oracles of 
the earliest ages. 

First, For the fact that the Gentile world 
in the darkest ages was possessed of ex- 
plicit written prophecies of Christ, I shall 
found the proof of it on the contents of a 
very extraordinary book, which was pre- 
served at Rome under the name of the 
oracles of the Cumsean Sibyl, which was 
held in such veneration that it was deposit- 
ed in a stone chest in the temple of Jupiter 
in the Capitol, and committed to the care 
of two persons expressly appointed to that 
office. For the contents of this book I 
shall make no appeal to the quotations of 



7 



the ancient fathers. I am well persuaded 
that many of them were deceived*, and 
that the verses which they produce as pro- 
phecies of Christ found in the Sibylline 
books, and which contain rather a minute 
detail of the miraculous circumstances of 
our Saviour's life than general predictions 
of his advent and his office, were scanda- 
lous forgeries. And God forbid that I 
should endeavour to restore the credit of 
an imposture that hath been long since 
exploded. At the same time I must ob- 
serve, that though this censure be just as 
applied to the later fathers, yet the tes- 



* It is remarkable, however, that Celsus charged the 
Christians of his time with interpolating the Sibylline books. 
Origen challenges him to support the accusation by specific 
instances of the fraud, and insinuates that the most ancient 
copies of those books had the passages which Celsus 
esteemed insertions of the Christians. Contra Cjelsum, 
p, 368, 369, E, 

B 4 



8 

timony of the earlier, of Justin Martyr in 
particular, and of Clemens Alexandrinus> 
seems deserving of more credit; Not so 
much for the great learning and piety of 
those venerable writers, for v^ith all this 
they were very capable of giving too easy 
credit to what might seem to serve their 
cause; but because they lived before the 
age of pious frauds, as they were called, 
commenced, and while the Sibylline books 
were extant j so that they might easily 
have been confuted by the heathens, 
had they alleged as quotations from those 
books, forged predictions, which appeared 
not in the authentic copies. Of their evi- 
dence however I shall not avail myself; 
for I would build my assertion on none 
but the most solid ground. I shall there- 
fore take my idea of the contents of these 
books entirely from the testimony of hea- 
then writers. At least I shall make no 



9 



use of any assertion even of the earliest 
fathers ; much less shall I credit any of the 
quotations of the latter, except so far as I 
find them supported by the most unques- 
tionable heathen evidence. 

Among heathen writers, I believe, it 
would be in vain to seek for any quotations 
of particular passages from the Sibylline 
oracles. They never made any. For, to 
produce the words of the Sibylline text, 
would have been dangerous violation of a 
law, by which the publication of any part 
of these writings was made a capital of- 
fence. We have however such represent- 
ations of the general argument of the 
book, and of the general purport of parti- 
cular prophecies, as afford a strong pre- 
sumption in favour of the opinion we have 
advanced, that it was composed of adul- 
terated fragments of the patriarchal pro- 
phecies and records, and that put it out 



10 



of doubt, that of much of the prophetic 
part the Messiah was the specific subject. 

From the general argument of the book 
as it is represented by heathen writers, it 
is very evident that it could be no forgery 
of heathen priestcraft ; for this reason, that 
it was exceedingly unfavourable to that 
system of idolatrous superstition, which it 
was the great concern and interest of the 
heathen priesthood to propagate and sup- 
port ; and this was probably the true rea- 
son that the Roman Senate committed the 
book to the custody of two of the Augural 
College, and kept it from the inspection 
of the vulgar by the severest laws. Now 
this extraordinary fact, that it was little 
for the interests of idolatry that the con- 
tents of the Cumaean oracles should be 
divulged, we learn from a dispute which 
was keenly agitated at Rome, between the 
friends of Julius Caesar and the leader of 

*6 



11 



the republican party ; in the course of 
which a member of the Augural College in 
the heat of argument let the secret out. 

Julius Caesar, you know, attained the 
height of his power within a fev/ years be- 
fore our Saviour's birth : little was wanting 
to his greatness but the title of a king, of 
which he was ambitious. The difficulty 
was to bring the Senate to confer it ; for, 
without their sanction it was unsafe to as- 
sume it. One of his adherents thought of 
an expedient not unlikely to succeed. He 
produced a prophecy from the Cumaean 
Sibyl of a king who was to arise at this 
time, whose monarchy was to be univer- 
sal, and whose government would be neces- 
sary and essential to the happiness of the 
world. The artful statesman knew, that if 
he could once create a general persuasion 
upon the credit of this prophecy, that uni- 
versal monarchy was to be established, and 



12 



that the state of the world required it, the 
difficulty would not be great to prove, 
that Caesar was the person of his times 
best qualified to wield the sceptre. 

The republican party took the alarm. 
TuUy was at that time its chief support, 
and his great abilities were called forth to 
oppose this stratagem of the dictator's fac- 
tion. In his opposition to it he brings no 
charge of falsification against those who 
alleged this prophecy. He denies not that 
a prophecy to this effect was actually con- 
tained in the Sibylline books, to which as 
a member of the Augural College he had 
free access; and when he allowed the ex- 
istence of the prophecy, he was a better 
politician than to make the application of 
it to Caesar the point of controversy, and 
to risk the success of his opposition to the 
schemes of Caesar's party upon the preca- 
rious success of that particular question. 



13 



Confessing the prophecy, he knew it was 
impolitic to attempt to apply it to any but 
a Roman, and applying it to a Roman it 
had been difficult to draw it away from 
Caesar. He therefore takes another ground. 
— Having granted that the prophecy was 
fairly alleged by the opposite party from 
the Sibylline books, he attempts to over- 
throw the credit of the prophecy by a 
general attack on the credit of the books 
in which it was found. He affirms that 
these Sibylline oracles were no prophecies. 
His argument is, that in the writings of 
the Sibyl no marks are to be found^of 
phrenzy or disorder, which the heathens 
conceived to be the necessary state of 
every prophet's mind while he prophesied, 
because the prophets of their oracular tem- 
ples affected it. But these books, he says, 
carried such evident marks of art and 
study, particularly in the regular structure 



14 



of the verse, as proved that it was the work 
of a writer who had the natural use and 
possession of his faculties. This state- 
ment of TuUy's may be correct, but his 
conclusion is erroneous, at least it must 
appear so to us who take our notions of 
prophetic style from the specimens which 
the Bible furnishes : for the true prophets 
were never impeded or disturbed in the 
natural use and possession of their faculties 
by the divine impulse. Their faculties were 
not disturbed, but exalted and invigorated ; 
and in the most animated of the sacred 
prophecies we find, beside what might 
be the natural character of the prophetic 
style, force, elevation, and sudden transi- 
tion ; we find, beside, an exquisite art of 
composition, and a wonderful regularity of 
versification. However, the Roman critic 
having proved, as he imagined, from this 
circumstance, that these SibylHne oracles 



15 



were no prophecies, concludes his whole 
argument with this edifying remark : " Let 
us then," says he, " adhere to the prudent 
practice of our ancestors ; let us keep the 
Sibyl in religious privacy ; these writings 
are indeed rather calculated to extinguish 
than to propagate superstition." This tes- 
timony is above all exception. TuUy, as 
an augur, had free access to the book in 
question. It cannot be doubted that he 
would improve his opportunities ; for he 
was a man of an exquisite taste, of much 
learned curiosity ; and, with these endow- 
ments, of a . very religious turn of mind. 
It is certain therefore that he speaks 
upon the best information ; and he is the 
more to be credited, as this frank confes- 
sion fell from him in the heat of a political 
debate in which he took an interested 
part. And from this testimony we may 
conclude, that the ancient fathers, what- 



16 



ever judgment is to be passed upon their 
pretended quotations from the Sibylline 
books, were not mistaken in the general 
assertion, that the worship of the one true 
God, the doctrine of the immortality of the 
soul, and of a future retribution, were, in- 
culcated in these writings ; which it seems, 
in TuUy's judgment, (and a competent 
judge he was,) were proper weapons to 
combat idolatry : and by what weapons 
may error be more successfully combated 
than by the truth ? 

If the Sibylline oracles in their general 
tenor were unfriendly to the interests of 
idolatry, it is the less to be wondered, that 
they should contain predictions of its final 
extirpation : Of this I shall now produce 
the evidence ; still relying, not upon par- 
ticular quotations, but upon the general 
allusions of the heathen writers. 



Virgil the celebrated Roman poet flou- 
rished in the court of Augustus no long 
time before our Saviour's birth, when the 
general expectation of a person to appear 
who should abolish both physical and 
moral evil was at the highest* 

Among his works still extant is a con- 
gratulatory poem addressed to a noble 
Roman, the poet's friend, who bore the 
high office of consul at the time when it 
was written. The occasion seems to have 
been the birth of some child, in whose for- 
tunes Pollio, the poet's friend, was nearly 
interested. The compliment to PolUo is 
double, being partly drawn from a flatter- 
ing prediction of the infant's future great- 
ness, (for it is affirmed, that he will prove 
nothing less than the expected deliverer,) 
and partly from this circumstance, that the 
year of Pollio's consulate should be distin- 
guished by the birth of such a child. Who- 

c 



18 



ever should read this poem without a know- 
ledge of the history of the times would con- 
clude, that it was a compliment to PoUio 
upon the birth of his own son. 

But it is a very extraordinary, but a 
verv certain fact, that the consul had no 
son born in the year of his consulate, or 
within any short time before or after it. 
Nor will the history of these times furnish 
us with any child born within a moderate 
distance of Pollio's year of ofBce, whichy 
by its rank and connection with his family, 
might seem of sufficient importance to be 
the subject of this congratulation, even 
when all possible allowance has been made 
for a poet's exaggeration and a courtier's 
flattery. But what is most worthy of re- 
mark, and the most for my present pur- 
pose, is the description which the heathen 
poet gives of the extraordinary person that 
he expected; of his origin, his achieve- 

^6 



19 



ments, and the good consequences of his 
appearance ; which is such, that if any illi- 
terate person who was to hear this poem 
read in an exact translation, with the omis- 
sion only of the names of heathen deities, 
and of allusion to profane mythology, 
which occur in a few passages, — any illite- 
rate person who was to hear the poem read 
with these omissions, which would not at 
all affect the general sense of it, if he had 
not been told before that it was the com- 
position of an heathen author, would with- 
out hesitation pronounce it to be a pro- 
phecy of the Messiah, or a poem at least 
upon that subject written in express imi- 
tation of the style of the Jewish prophets. 
The resemblance between the images of 
this poem and those in which the inspired 
prophets describe the times of the Messiah, 
has ever been remarked with surprise by 
the learned^ as indeed it is much too 

e 2 



20 



striking to escape notice ; and many at- 
tempts have been made to account for it. 
It has been imagined, that the poet had 
actually borrowed his images from the 
prophets. The books of the Old Testa- 
ment having been translated into the Greek 
language long before the days of Virgil, it 
has been supposed that he might have be- 
come conversant with the sacred writings 
in the Greek translation. 

But I see no reason to believe that these 
books were ever in any credit among the 
Romans, or that the contents of them 
were known at all, except to some few 
who were proselytes to the Jewish religion. 

It has been supposed, that Herod's visit 
at the court of Augustus might be the 
means of making the Roman poet ac- 
quainted with the Hebrew bards. Herod 
indeed was some months at Rome, but 
there is little probability that the king, or 



21 



any of his train, had leisure to be the poet's 
tutor in Hebrew learning. It is very 
strange that in so many attempts to ac- 
count for the extraordinary fact under 
consideration, more attention should not 
have been paid to the account which the 
poet himself has given of it.. He refers to 
the oracles of the Cumaean Sibyl as the 
source from which he drew these predic- 
tions. And in this lay the whole force of 
his compliment to Pollio, — That the child 
whose future greatness was the object of 
Pollio' s ambition^ would prove to be that 
personage xvhom the Cumcean Sybil had an" 
nounced as a deliverer of the world from 
physical and moral evil. For that is the 
sum and substance of the character ac- 
cording to the poet's description. Here^ 
then, we have the clear testimony of this 
heathen poet, that the oracles of the Sibyl 
contained a prophecy, not accomplished 

c 3 



22 



when he wrote this congratulatory poem 
to his friend, but hkely to be accomplished 
in the rising generation^ of the appearance 
of a very extraordinary person. We know 
that the Jewish prophets marked the same 
time for the season of the Messiah's ad- 
vent. From the strain of the poet's com- 
pliments, we gather the particulars of the 
Sibylline prophecy in regard to the cha- 
racter which it ascribes to the person 
whose appearance it announced ; we find 
that this character perfectly agrees with 
that of the Messiah as it is drawn by the 
Jewish prophets ; the difference being only 
this, that the Jewish prophecies are more 
circumstantial than the Sibylline. 

The sum of the character is the same in 
both ; in its nature unequivocal, and such 
as even in the general outline could not 
possibly belong to different persons in the 
same age. 



23 



The object of the Sibylline oracle, as 
well as the Messiah of the Jews, was 
to be of heavenly extraction, — the high 
offspring of the gods, the great seed of 
Jupiter. He was to strike an universal 
peace, and to command the whole world 5 
and in this universal government he was 
to exercise his father's virtues. He was 
to abolish all violence and injustice, to re- 
store the life of man to its original simpli- 
city and innocence, and the condition of 
man to its original happiness. He was 
to abolish the causes of violent death ; and 
all death, considered as a curse, is violent. 
He was to kill the serpent, and purge the 
vegetable kingdom of its poisons. The 
blessings of his reign were to reach even 
to the brute creation ; for the beasts of 
the forest were to lose their savage nature, 
that the ox might graze in security within 
sight of the lion. 

c 4 



24 



It is evident, therefore, that the Jewish 
prophecies and the SibylKne oracles an- 
nounce the same person, and of conse- 
quence, that the Sibylline oracles contained 
a prediction of the Messiah. Nor is it to 
be wondered, that the images of sacred 
prophecy should abound in this treasure 
of the heathen temples if it was composed 
of adulterated fragments of true prophecies. 
The thing seems inexplicable upon any 
other supposition. 

Thus it appears, that the Romans at 
leasts in the ages of their worst idolatry, 
were in possession of a book which they 
held, though they knew not why, in reli- 
gious veneration, containing explicit pro- 
phecies of Christ. An extraordinary acci- 
dent recorded in history furnishes an in- 
contestable proof that the same prophecies 
were extant in a very late age, in various 
parts of the world, 



25 



About a century before our Saviour's 
birth, the book of the Cumaean Sibyl was 
destroyed by a fire which broke out in the 
Capitol, and consumed the temple where 
those writings were deposited. The Ro- 
man senate thought it of so much im- 
portance to repair the loss, that they sent 
persons to make a new collection of the Si- 
bylline oracles in different parts of Asia, in 
the islands of the Archipelago, in Africa, 
and in Sicily ; for in all these parts copies, 
or at least fragments, of these prophecies 
were supposed to be preserved. The de- 
puties after some time returned with a 
thousand verses, more or less, collected in 
different places, from which the most 
learned men at Rome were employed to 
select what they judged the most authentic ; 
and this collection was deposited to supply 
the loss of the original. 



26 



I have now established my fact, that 
from the first ages of profane history to 
the very time of our Saviour's birth ex^ 
plicit predictions of him were extant in the 
Gentile world, in books which were ever 
holden in religious veneration, and which 
were deposited in their temples. The 
matter of these prophecies, and the agree^ 
ment of the imagery of their language with 
what we find in the prophecies of Holy 
Writ, is, I think, a sufficient argument of 
their divine original. Observe, I affirm 
not in general of the Sibylline books that 
they were divine, much less do I affirm 
that the Sibyls were women who had the 
gift of prophecy. I believe that they were 
fabulous personages, to whom the ignorant 
heathens ascribed the most ancient of 
their sacred books, when the true origin of 
them was forgotten. But the existence of 
these imaginary prophetesses, and the 



27 



authority of the writings ascribed to them, 
are distinct questions. Wiiether these 
books contained prophecies of Christ is a 
question of fact in which the affirmative is 
supported by the highest historical evi- 
dence. That these prophecies, wherever 
they might be found, could be of no other 
than divine original, the matter and the 
style of them is in my judgment an irre- 
fragable argument ; when and where these 
prophecies were originally delivered, to 
whom they were addressed, and how they 
came to make a part of the treasure of the 
heathen temples, are questions which re- 
main to be considered. 

That they were drawn from the Jewish 
prophecies is improbable ; for the books 
of the Cumaean Sibyl fell into the hands 
of the Romans, if we may credit their his- 
torians, in a very early age, when they 
were an obscure, inconsiderable people, 



28 



without any connections in the East, and 
long before any part of the Old Testament 
was extant in the Greek language. And 
yet after the first settlement of the Jews in 
Canaan, I am persuaded that true pro- 
phets were nowhere to be found but in the 
Jewish church. These prophecies then, 
that were current in the Gentile world in 
later ages, since they were neither for- 
geries of the heathen priests, nor founded 
on the Jewish prophecies, must have been 
derived from prophecies more ancient than 
the Jewish. They were fragments, (muti- 
lated, perhaps, and otherwise corrupted,) but 
they were fragments of the most ancient 
prophecies of the patriarchal ages. By 
what means fragments of the prophecies 
of the patriarchal ages might be preserved 
among idolatrous nations is the difficulty to 
be explained. 



29 



To clear this question it will be neces- 
sary to consider, what was the actual state 
of revealed religion in the interval between 
the first appearance of idolatry in the 
world and the institution of the Jewish 
church by Moses. 

I shall show you, that though the be- 
ginning of idolatry through man's dege- 
neracy was earlier than might have been 
expected, its progress through God's gra- 
cious interposition was slower than is 
generally believed: That for some ag^s 
after it began the world at large enjoyed 
the light of Revelation in a very consider- 
able degree : That, while the corruption 
was gradually rising to its height. Provi- 
dence was taking measures for the general 
restoration at the appointed season : That 
the gift of prophecy was vouchsafed long 
before the institution of the Mosaic church : 
That letters being in use in the East long 



30 



before that epoch, the ancient prophecies 
were committed to writing ; and that, by 
the mysterious operation of that Provi- 
dence which directs all temporary and 
partial evil to everlasting and universal 
good, the blind superstition of idolaters 
was itself made the means of preserving 
these writings, not pure, but in a state that 
might serve the purpose of preparing the 
Gentiles for the advent of our Lord, and 
maintaining a religious veneration for 
them. 

I am then to consider what was the 
actual state of revealed religion, between 
the first appearance of idolatry in the 
world and the institution of the Mosaic 
church by Moses. 

Firsts It is obvious that the worship of 
Jehovah was originally universal, without 
any mixture of idolatry among the sons of 
Adam for some time after the creation ; 



31 



and that it became universal again among 
the descendants of Noah for some ages 
after the flood. It is obvious, that so long 
as this was universal, the promises would 
be universally remembered ; both the ge- 
neral promises of man's redemption, and 
the particular promises of blessings to cer- 
tain families ; and when the defection to 
idolatry began, these particular promises 
would be the means of retarding its pro- 
gress, and of preserving the worship of the 
true God in the descendants of those to 
whom these promises were made, for some 
ages at least after the revolt of the rest of 
mankind. 

And, on the other hand, wherever the 
true worship kept its ground the promises 
could not sink into oblivion. 

Thus I conceive the promises to Abra- 
ham would for some time be remembered, 
not only in Isaac's family, and in the 



3f 



twelve tribes of Arabians descending from 
Ishmael, but among the nations that arose 
from his sons by his second wife, Keturah ; 
and these, if I mistake not, peopled the 
whole country that lay between the Ara- 
bian and the Persian Gulf, and occupied 
considerable tracts in Africa, and in the 
upper part of Asia near the Caspian Sea ; 
and the memory of these promises, in all 
these nations, would for several ages keep 
the true religion in some degree alive. So 
the earlier promises to Shem contained in 
Noah's prophetic benediction, would be 
for some time remembered among his 
posterity ; and accordingly we find from 
ancient history, that the Persians, the Assy- 
rians, and the people of Mesopotamia, the 
offspring of Shem, through his sons Elam,^ 
Ashur, and Aram, were among the last na- 
tions that fell into any gross idolatry. 



38 



Now if we are right in these principles 
(and I think they are principles in which 
it is impossible to be greatly in the wrong, 
for the memory which I suppose of bless- 
ings promised to the head of a family, with 
which some degree of veneration for the 
Deity from whom they came and by whose 
providence they were to be accomplished, 
that is, some degree of the true religion 
would be inseparably connected ; — the me- 
mory, I say, of such blessings seems but 
a necessary effect of that complacency 
which: men naturally feel in the notion that 
they have a claim, or that they stand with- 
in a probable expectation of a claim, to 
hereditary honour and distinctions) ; but if 
we are right in the supposition of some 
long remembrance of the promises, and a 
preservation of the true religion among the 
descendants of the Patriarchs to whom 
the promises were given, the first defection 



34 



from the worship of the true God could 
not be universal, it could only be partial. 
And the effect of a partial defection would 
be, that all the nations whose loyalty to the 
Sovereign Lord remained unshaken, would 
take measures to resist the corruption and 
maintain among themselves the true wor- 
ship of the true God. 

Something of this kind seems to have 
happened early in the antediluvian world. 
" In the days of Enos, men began to call 
" themselves by the name of Jehovah." At 
this time, pious men took alarm at the be- 
ginning of idolatry in the reprobate family 
of Cain, and formed themselves in a dis- 
tinct party, and took a name of distinction 
to themselves as worshippers of the true 
God, They called themselves by the 
name of Jehovah as we now call ourselves 
by the name of Christ ; and they probably 



35 



made profession of the true religion by 
some public rites. 

As human nature is in all ages much the 
same, something similar is likely to have 
happened upon the first revival of idolatry 
after the flood. The measures that were 
used for the preservation of the true reli- 
gion were likely to be some one or all of 
these. 

If any of the nations that adhered to the 
true God had in these ages the use of let- 
ters, (and the use of letters in the East, I 
am persuaded, is of much greater antiqui- 
ty than is generally supposed), they would 
commit to writing, and collect in books 
what tradition had preserved of the begin- 
ning of the world and the promises to 
their ancestors. These books would be 
committed to some public custody, and 
preserved as a sacred treasure. 

D 2 



36 



That something of this kind was done, 
appears, I think, from fragments which 
still remain of ancient Eastern histories, 
which, in certain particulars of the deluge, 
and in the dates which they assign to the 
rise of the most ancient kingdoms, are 
wonderfully consonant with the Mosaic 
records. 

Again, the most interesting passages of 
the ancient history of the world, particu- 
larly the promises, they would put into 
verse, that they might more easily be com- 
mitted to memory. It would be part of 
the education of the youth of both sexes 
and of all conditions, to make them get 
these verses by heart. They would be set 
to music and sung at certain stated festi- 
vals. That this was done (that it could 
hardly be omitted) is highly probable, be- 
cause it was the universal practice of all 
the nations of antiquity to record in song 



37 



whatever they wished should be long re- 
membered, — the exploits of their warriors, 
their lessons of morality, their precepts of 
religion, and their laws. They would in- 
stitute public rites, in which the history of 
the old world, and of the privileged patri- 
archs in particular, would be commemo- 
rated in certain enigmatical ceremonies. 
In these there would be allusions to the 
deluge, to the ark, to the raven and the 
dove, to Noah's intoxication, to the diffe- 
rent behaviour of his three sons upon that 
occasion, to Abraham's entertainment of 
his three guests from heaven, to his battle 
with the confederate kings, to the offering 
of Isaac, to the exile of Hagar and her son, 
and other parts of patriarchal history. 
That something of this kind was done, 
appears, I think, by manifest allusions 
that we find to some of these particulars 
in the religious rites of some ancient na- 

D 3 



38 



tions, even after they became idolaters. 
These institutions would perhaps in the 
end be the means of spreading the corrup- 
tion they were intended to resist. At the 
first they would be simple, significant, per- 
spicuous, and of good effect ; but by de- 
grees additions would be made to them 
without any attention to the original mean- 
ing, for no other purpose but to add to 
the gaiety and splendor of the spectacle : 
And these improvements of the show 
would be multiplied till they destroyed 
the significance of the symbol, and render- 
ed the simple and instructive rite, first in- 
consistent, then obscure, absurd, and unin- 
tellible, at last perhaps lascivious and 
obscene. 

This, however, would be the conse- 
quence of a slow and gradual corruption j 
and I mention it only to remark, what 
extreme caution should be used in intro- 



39 



ducing any thing into religious rites which 
may too forcibly strike the grosser senses, 
and by imperceptible degrees change pub- 
lic worship from an employment of the 
intellect into an amusement of the imagin- 
ation. Our church, when she separated 
from the Roman communion, wisely re- 
trenched the pomp and gaiety of shows 
and processions, while she retained every 
thing that was truly majestic and might 
serve to elevate the mind of the worship- 
per. Public worship should be simple 
without meanness, dignified without page- 
antry. But this by the way. I return to 
my subject. — 

These were the means which men were 
likely to employ (I shall come afterwards 
to speak of means employed, as I con- 
ceive, by God himself) : but these are 
means which men would be likely to em- 

D 4 



40 



ploy to resist the progress of idolatry when 
it first began. 

Written collections of traditional history, 
songs of high and holy argument, rites 
and shows of historical allusion : and these 
means could not but have a lasting and a 
great effect to preserve the true religion, in 
some considerable degree at least, among 
all the nations where they were practised ; 
that is, not only among Abraham's descend- 
ants, but in all the other branches of Shem's 
posterity, — among the Edomites, Moabites, 
Arabians, Assyrians, Persians, and many 
other people of less note, notwithstand- 
ing that many of these in later times be- 
came the worst of idolaters. 

In what age or in what country idolatry 
made its first appearance, we have no cer- 
tain information. The suspicion, I think, 
may reasonably fall upon Canaan, from 
the curse which is so emphatically pro- 



41 



nounced upon him upon the occasion of 
his father's crime, rather than upon any 
other of Ham's descendants, which must 
have had its reason in some particular im- 
piety in the character of Canaan himself, 
or of his early descendants. We have it 
however from the highest authority, that 
it prevailed in that part of Mesopotamia 
where the race of the Chaldeans afterwards 
arose, in the days of Terah the father of 
Abraham. For Joshua begins his last ex- 
hortation to the Israelites with reminding 
them, that " in old time their fathers dwelt 
" on the other side of the flood, even Te- 
" rah the father of Abraham and the fa- 
" ther of Nachor, and they served other 
" gods." This passage puts it out of doubt 
that some sort of idolatry prevailed in Te- 
rah's time in his country. But it amounts 
not to a certain proof that Terah, or any of 
his ancestors, were themselves idolaters ; for 



42 



the expression, that they served, necessa- 
rily imports no more than that they lived 
as subjects in countries where other gods 
were worshipped. In this sense it is said 
of the Jewish people in their dispersion, 
they should serve other gods ; and yet the 
Jews in their dispersions have never been 
idolaters. In the sequel of this same 
speech, the service which the fathers of 
the Israelites, while they dwelt beyond the 
flood, paid to other gods, is so expressly 
opposed to the worship of Jehovah now 
required of the Israelites, that little doubt 
can remain that the expression of serving 
other gods is to be taken here in its literal 
meaning, — that the ancestors of Abraham, 
and Abraham himself, before God's gra- 
cious call, were infected with the idolatry 
which in that age prevailed. 

It is not to my present purpose to trace 
the progress of idolatry through all its dii- 



43 



ferent stages ; it will be sufficient for me to 
show, that for many ages the worship of 
the true God subsisted, though preposter- 
ously blended with the superstitious adora- 
tion of fictitious deities and ev6n of images. 
Just as at this day in the church of Rome, 
the worship of the ever-blessed Trinity sub- 
sists in preposterous conjunction with the 
idolatrous worship of canonized men and 
inanimate relics. 

When Abraham took up his abode in 
Gerar, the chief city of the Philistine, Abi- 
melech, the king of Gerar, became ena- 
moured of his wife. Upon this occasion 
God came to Abimelech ; and the motive 
of his coming was in mercy to Abimelech, 
that he might not draw destruction upon 
himself and upon his family, by the indig- 
nity which he was upon the point of offer- 
ing to Abraham's wife. From this it has 
been, with great probability, concluded, that 



44 



this Abimelech, and the people which he 
governed, were worshippers of God ; for it 
is not hkely that such tenderness should 
have been shown to a wicked prince and 
a wicked nation. Sarah's purity might 
have been preserved by other means. Nor 
does the humility and submission with 
which Abimelech receives the heavenly 
warning, nor the severity with which he 
expostulates with the patriarch for his un- 
just suspicion of him and his subjects, suit 
the character of one who feared not God. 

Again, in the days of Isaac, another Abi- 
melech, the son or grandson of the former, 
in an interview with Isaac (the object 
of which was to compose some quarrels 
that had arisen between Isaac's herdsmen 
and his own subjects), tells Isaac that he 
saw certainly that Jehovah was with him. 
That under this conviction he solicited his 
friendship and his peace ; and he call^ 



45 



Isaac the Blessed of Jehovah. This is the 
language of one who feared Jehovah and 
acknowledged his providence. In the 
days of Abraham, therefore, and of Isaac, 
the worship of the true God was not yet 
extinguished among the idolaters of Pales- 
tine. 

In Mesopotamia, in the same age, the 
family of Nachor, Abraham's brother, was 
not untainted with idolatry. Laban had 
certain images which he calls his gods, for 
which it should seem that his daughter 
Rachel entertained some degree of venera- 
tion. Yet two occasions are recorded, 
upon which Laban mentions the name 
of Jehovah, and acknowledges his provi- 
dence. The first is, when he receives 
Abraham's steward, who came as a suitor 
on the part of Isaac to Rebecca ; the se- 
cond, when he solemnly calls Jehovah 
to witness the reciprocal engagements of 



46 



friendsliip between Jacob and himself at 
their parting. 

In Egypt, the great workshop of Satan, 
where the molten images were cast which 
in later ages all the world adored, — in 
Egypt idolatry was in its infancy (if it had 
at all gotten ground) in the days of Joseph. 
For when Joseph was brought to Pharaoh 
to interpret his dream, the holy patriarch 
and the Egyptian king speak of God in 
much the same language, and with the 
same acknowledgment of his overruling 
providence. 

It may be added that this dream, though 
perhaps the chief end of it was the eleva- 
tion of Joseph and the settlement of Ja- 
cob's family in Goshen, is some argument 
of a care of providence for the Egyptian 
people ; for by this merciful warning they 
were enabled to provide against the seven 
years of famine. 



47 



Idolatry therefore in this country was 
in no advanced state in Joseph's time, and 
the settlement of the patriarchs there, and 
the rank and authority that Joseph held, 
must have checked its growth for some 
considerable period. 

At the time when the Israelites went out 
of Egypt, that country and the land of 
Canaan were sunk in the grossest idolatry. 
The name of Jehovah was forgotten, and 
in the public religion no traces were re- 
maining of his worship. And yet the ex- 
amples upon record of particular persons, 
who amid the general apostacy retained 
some attachment to the service of the true 
God, afford I think an argument, that in 
either country this extreme degeneracy was 
at that time of no very ancient date. 

The two Egyptian women to whom 
Pharaoh committed the iniquitous business 
of stifling the male children of the Hebrews 



48 



in the hirth ^' feared God,^' i. e. they feared 
the true God ; for the superstitious fear of 
idols is never, in the Scripture language, 
called the fear of God. They feared God 
in that degree, that they would not execute 
the king's command ; and that the true 
fear of God was the motive from which 
they acted, appears from the recompense 
they received : " Because the midwives 
" feared God, God dealt well with them, and 
made their families great and prosperous." 
The mixed multitude which went with 
Moses out of Egypt, though not genuine 
Israelites, were surely in some degree wor- 
shippers of the God of Israel ; for idolaters, 
in the proper sense of the word, would 
hardly have been permitted to follow the 
armies of the Lord. And after forty years, 
when the Israelites arrived at the land of 
Canaan, Joshua's spies found, in the town 
of Jericho, a woman who confessed that 
3* 



49 



Jehovah the God of Israel, he is God 
" hi heaven above and in the earth be- 

neath." And from this persuasion, and 
in confident expectation of the execution 
of his vengeance on her guilty country, she 
entertained the Israelitish spies, and ma- 
naged their escape, for which she is com- 
memorated by St. Paul in his epistle to the 
Hebrews among the eminent examples of 
faith. 

These remains of true religion which 
were found in Egypt and Canaan so late 
as the days of Moses and Joshua are, I 
think, a proof, that a total apostacy from 
the invisible Creator to the worship of fic- 
titious deities as the sole managers and 
masters of this lower world, general as it 
was now become, had not however long 
prevailed in the countries where the cor- 
ruptions of idolatry were of the longest 



50 



standing, and may be supposed to have 
made the greatest advances. 

And as for the idolatry of the older and 
the milder sort, which, retaining the wor- 
ship of the true God and acknowledging 
his providence, added a superstitious ado- 
ration of certain inferior spirits, who were 
supposed to have a delegated command, 
under the control of the Supreme, over 
different parts of nature, from this even 
the chosen family itself was not always 
pure. 

When the patriarch was to take up his 
abode at Bethel, the place where God ap- 
peared to him when he fled from Esau, 
which he considered as sanctified by God's 
immediate presence, we find him ordering 
his household to put away their strange 
gods ; of which they had no small variety, 
as appears by the sacred historian's expres- 
sion, that in compliance with this injunc- 



51 



tion they gave unto Jacob all their strange 
gods. These were probably the idols 
which Rachel brought with her from Meso- 
potamia, with others introduced by Judah^s 
marriage with the daughter of a Canaanite. 

Upon occasion of his removal to Bethel, 
the patriarch reformed the worship of his 
family and his dependents, and took mea- 
sures to prevent an immediate revival of 
the corruption. He put the objects of. 
superstitious adoration out of sight, bury- 
ing the idols under an oak near Shechem. 
But none that is conversant with the sacred 
history of the Israelites can doubt, that 
after Jacob's death, his descendants con- 
tracted a new stain, and in the later years 
of their sojournment in Goshen were 
deeply infected with the idolatry which 
then prevailed in Egypt, to which in the 
desert they discovered an attachment. 

E 2 



52 



The molten calf they made in Horeb wa& 
surely not the first they had worshipped. 

I have now considered, as I proposed^ 
the general state of religion in the world 
before the institution of the Jewish church. 
I have shown you the seductive form in 
which idolatry began, and the slow pro- 
gress that it made ; which is partly to be 
ascribed to the means employed by pious 
nations in the beginning to resist the cor- 
ruption, but in much greater part, as I 
shall hereafter show, to the merciful provi- 
dence of God. Idolatry, in that malignant 
form which disowns the true God, and 
attaches itself entirely to fictitious divini- 
ties, prevailed nowhere till some short time, 
perhaps a century or more, before the de- 
liverance of the Israelites from their Egyp- 
tian bondage. Idolatry in its milder form, 
acknowledging the Supreme Providence, 
and retaining the fear and worship of the 



53 



true God, but adding the superstitious wor- 
ship of fictitious deities, prevailed every- 
where from the days of Abraham, his single 
family excepted ; insomuch that, after the 
death of Abraham and Isaac, the chosen 
family itself was from time to time in- 
fected. 

Now it is to be observed, that paganism 
in this milder form was rather to be called 
a corrupt than a false religion ; just as at 
this day the religion of the church of Rome 
is more properly corrupt than false. It is 
not a false religion ; for the professors of 
it receive, with the fullest submission of the 
understanding to its mysteries, the whole 
Gospel. They fear God. They trust in 
Christ as the author of salvation. They 
worship the three persons in the unity 
of the Godhead. The Roman church 
therefore hath not renounced the truth, 
but she has corrupted it ; and she hath 

E 3 



54 



corrupted it in the very same manner^ 
and nearly in the same degreej in which the 
truth of the patriarchal religion was cor- 
rupted by the first idolaters ; adding to the 
fear and worship of God and his Son the 
inferior fear and worship of deceased men, 
whose spirits they suppose to be invested 
with some delegated authority over Christ's 
church on earth. Now, the corruptions 
being so similar in kind, and pretty equal 
in degree, the idolaters of antiquity and 
the papists of modern times seem much 
upon a footing. 

Nor can I understand that these idola- 
ters, so long as they acknowledged the pro- 
vidence and retained the worship of the 
true God, and believed in the promises to 
the fathers, w^ere more separated from the 
church of Noah by their corruptions than 
the papists now, by similar corruptions, are 



55 



separated from the true catholic church 
of Christ. 

The ancient idolaters were not separated 
from the patriarchal church till their su- 
perstition ended in a total apostacy. The 
superstitions of Romanists may terminate 
in a similar apostacy equally complete, and 
then will they be equally .separated from 
the church of Christ. And this I say not 
in any bitterness of zeal against those of 
the Roman communion, whom I maintain 
to be as yet a part of the great Shepherd's 
flock, although in danger of being lost, but 
merely to compare past things with pre- 
sent, and to show by the analogy of mo- 
dern times what was the true state of reli- 
gion in the world at large in the middle 
ages of idolatry between its first rise and 
its last stage of a total apostacy. 

When this took place, the Gentile 
world were cut off from all communion 

E 4 



56 



with the worshippers of the true God 
by the institution of the Jewish church, 
from which idolaters of every degree and 
denomination were excluded. But in 
the whole intermediate period, the Gen- 
tiles were nothing less than the corrupt 
branch of the old patriarchal church, the 
church of Noah and of Shem ; and the fa- 
mily of Abraham were nothing more than 
the reformed part of it Now, since a 
church in any state of corruption short of 
apostacy, through God's merciful forbear- 
ance, retains the privileges of a church; that 
is, is indulged in those advantages which 
God of his free mercy grants to the general 
society of his worshippers on earth, and for 
this reason, that in the merciful judgment 
of our heavenly Father, in his pity for the 
infirmities of the human understanding, 
nothing but the apostacy of the heart ex- 
tinguishes the character of a worshipper— 



51 



I shall now inquire how far the Gen- 
tile world, in the middle ages between 
Abraham and Moses, considered as a cor- 
rupt branch of the patriarchal church, 
might be in the merciful care of Provi- 
dence ; what means might be used on the 
part of God to keep up the remembrance 
of himself among them, by a right use of 
which they might have recovered the pu- 
rity from which they fell, and which, 
though through the extreme degeneracy 
of mankind they prevented not a gene- 
ral apostacy for many ages, had a ten- 
dency however to the general restoration 
by raising an universal expectation of 
the great Restorer. And in this inquiry, 
I shall proceed as I have done in the pre- 
ceding part of my subject, by making the 
analogy of modern times the interpreter of 
ancient history. 



58 



I recur therefore to my former exam- 
ple, and I set out with this principle, 
that the church of Rome is at this day 
a corrupt church, — a church corrupted 
with idolatry ; with idolatry very much 
the same in kind and in degree with 
the worst that ever prevailed among the 
Egyptians or the Canaanites till within 
one or two centuries at the most of the 
time of Moses. Yet we see this corrupt, 
this idolatrous church of Rome, has her 
priests and her bishops, who, deriving in 
continual succession from the apostles, are 
true priests and true bishops, invested with 
the authority which, by the original institu- 
tions, belongs to those two orders. The 
priests of the corrupt church of Rome have 
a true authority (I speak not of an exclusive 
authority in prejudice of the Protestant 
priesthood,) but they have their share 
of the common authority of priests of the 



59 



church cathohc to preach the word of God, 
although they preach other things for 
which they have no authority. 

They have a true authority to administer 
the sacramentSj although they have no au- 
thority to institute new sacraments ; and we 
doubt not, notwithstanding their presump- 
tion in preaching adventitious doctrines, 
and in obtruding supernumerary sacra- 
ments, that the true word preached by 
them, and the true sacraments administer- 
ed, are accompanied with God's blessing, 
and produce a salutary effect on the heart 
of the hearer. 

Again, the bishops of this corrupt church 
have, in common with the bishops of the 
Protestant and of the Greek churches, all 
the authority of the first successors of the 
apostles, that may be supposed to subsist 
without the miraculous gifts of the Holy 
Spirit. 



60 



If they usurp rights which the inspired 
apostles never claimed, their just claims 
are not invalidated bv those unwarrantable 
pretensions : They are to judge of the qua- 
lifications of those that would be ordained : 
They have authority to appoint to the 
priest's office, and to consecrate to their 
own by the imposition of their hands : 
They are the overseers of Christ's flock : 
They have the power to suspend hetero- 
dox or immoral priests from the exercise 
of their function, and to exclude laics of 
scandalous lives from the sacraments : In a 
word, to inflict ecclesiastical censures and 
penalties for ecclesiastical offences. Like 
other magistrates, they are accountable to 
God for any abuse of power, but still the 
right of government is in their hands. In 
their own church, and over those of their 
own communion, they have a true epis- 
copal jurisdiction. And this is the avowed ' 



61 



opinion of the church of England, as it 
must be the opinion of all who acknow- 
ledge the divine institution of the episcopal 
order. For when a priest who has received 
his orders from a bishop of the church 
of Rome openly abjures the errors of that 
church, and declares his assent to the 
articles of the church of England, he be- 
comes immediately a priest in our church 
without any second ordination from a Pro- 
testant bishop : As a laic of that church 
who openly abjures its errors is admitted 
to our communion without any second 
baptism by the hands of a Protestant priest. 

Now, since in these days the church of 
Rome, though corrupted with idolatry, has 
her priests and her bishops, it may seem 
the less strange that the ancient patriarchal 
church, when she became corrupted with 
a similar idolatry in an equal degree 
should have her priests and her prophets. 



62 



True priests and true prophets, though 
not perhaps untainted with the errors of 
their times ; priests who offered sacrifices 
to the true God, and had authority to ac- 
cept the oblations of the laity; prophets 
who were commissioned to resist the pre- 
vailing corruption, and to prophesy of the 
great redemption. That these two orders 
were maintained through the wonderful 
mercy of God in idolatrous countries, till 
the degeneracy came to that extreme de- 
gree that he judged it fit to separate the 
apostates, and to put his chosen people 
under the safe keeping of the law, I shall 
now prove from the sacred records. 

And, first, for the priests of the patri- 
archal church in her corrupted state. 

In the days of Abraham, a prince of a 
Canaanitish nation, Melchizedek king of 
Salem, was the priest of the Most High 
God. The Jews have indeed a vain tra- 
3*. 



63 



dition that this Melchizedek was the patri- 
arch Shem. According to the chronology 
which the Jews choose to follow, Shem 
might be alive at the time that Melchi- 
zedek received the tenths from Abraham. 
But by a truer account, which the Jews 
followed in more ancient times, and which 
was followed by all the primitive fathers 
of the Christian church, Shem was dead 
above four hundred years before Abraham 
was born ; and if we were even to grant 
that he might be living in the days of 
Abraham, the Jews have not yet explained 
how he came by the kingdom which this 
tradition gives him in the land of Canaan- 
But we have it on better than rabbinical 
authority, on the authority of an apostle, 
that Melchizedek had no connection with 
the family of Abraham. " He counted 
" not his descent," saith St. Paul, " from 
" them," And St. Paul's argument, as is 



64 



acutely remarked by the learned Bishop 
Patrick, would be equally inconclusive 
whether Melchizedek's descent were count- 
ed from Abraham, or Abraham's from him. 
Melchizedek, therefore, was neither descen- 
dant nor any ancestor of Abraham. He 
was, as Josephus the learned historian of 
the Jews candidly acknowledges, a prince 
of Canaan. 

Yet was he no self-constituted usurping 
priest, but a priest by divine appointment 
and commission, as appears by the defer- 
ence which Abraham paid him : " For con- 
" sider how great this man was, unto whom 
" even the patriarch Abraham gave the tenth 
" of the spoils." This tenth of the spoils was 
no payment to Melchizedek in his tempo- 
ral capacity as king of Salem, for any assist- 
ance he had given Abraham in the battle ; 
for he went out to meet him when he was 
returning from the slaughter of the kings. 



65 



The king of Salem therefore had taken no 
part in the expedition ; he had remained 
at home inactive, and went out to meet 
the patriarch upon his return, in the qua- 
lity of God's high-priest, to pronounce 
God's blessing upon him, to bear his pub- 
lic testimony to Abraham as God's chosen 
servant, and to declare that it was by the 
immediate succour of the arm of the Most 
High God, whose priest he was, that Abra- 
ham's little army had overthrown the con- 
federate kings ; and the tenths, being no 
payment for a military service, could be no- 
thing else than a religious offering on the 
part of Abraham, by which he acknow- 
ledged the protection of the Most High 
God, and acknowledged the authority of 
Melchizedek's priesthood ; the divine au- 
thority of which appears again more strong- 
ly in this circumstance, that this priest 
Melchizedek was no less than the type of 



66 



that high-priest who now standeth at God's 
right hand making intercession for the sins 
of all mankind. Of his universal everlast- 
ing priesthood, the priesthood of Melchi- 
zedek was the type. 

The prophet David declares the nature 
of Christ's priesthood, by the analogy it 
bears to the priesthood of Melchizedek. 
And from this analogy, St. Paul builds 
his great argument for the superiority of 
Christ's priesthood above the Levitical. 
Christ is for this reason a priest for ever, be- 
cause he is after the order of Melchizedek. 

From all this it appears, that in the 
days of Abraham at least there was a 
priesthood among the Canaanites of higher 
rank than the Levitical, and more exactly 
typical of the priesthood of the Son of 
God. 

Again, in the days of Joseph, we find in 
Egypt a Potipherah a priest of On, whose 



67 



daughter Joseph married 5 and in the days 
of Moses, a Jethro a priest of Midian, 
whose daughter Moses married. It has 
been made a question concerning both 
these persons, whether they were priests at 
alh The doubt arises from the ambiguity 
of the Hebrew word, which is used in some 
parts of Scripture for a prince or magis- 
trate. But it is to be observed, that not a 
single passage is to be found in the books 
of Moses where it is used in these senses, 
except it be in these two instances. That 
they were both priests, was clearly the 
opinion of the Jews who made the first 
Greek translation of the Pentateuch, of the 
Jewish historian Josephus, and of St. Je- 
rome. 

And if they were priests at all, they 
were priests of the true God, the one in 
Egypt in the town of On in the days of 
Joseph, the other among the Midianites in 

F 2 



68 



the days of Moses. For it is hardly credi- 
ble, that Providence should have permit- 
ted either Joseph or Moses to contract an 
alliance by marriage with a priest of any 
idolatrous temple. 

Thus it appears, that the true God had 
an order of priests in the Gentile world 
down to the time of the Mosaic institution. 
These priests were the corrupt remains of 
the ancient priesthood of Noah's universal 
church. 

We have then, I think, found the priests 
of the patriarchal church in its corrupted 
state ; let us now look for its prophets. 
This is a point still more material to estab- 
lish than the existence of the priesthood, ' 
because it is the existence of true prophe- 
cies among idolatrous nations which is the 
chief subject of our inquiry ; and true pro- 
phecies, that is, prophecies of divine ori- 
ginal, could not have been found among 



69 



idolatrous nations, unless certain persons 
had lived amongst them who were gifted 
by the spirit of God, and favoured with 
divine communications. 

But of this order we have two undoubt- 
ed instances, — the one in Job, the other 
in Balaam. 

Job, by the consent of the learned of all 
ages, was no Israelite. He was certainly 
of the family of Abraham ; for whatever 
difficulties may be raised about his parti- 
cular country, none will deny that it lay in 
some part of that region of which the whole 
was occupied by Abraham's descendants. 
He was not however of the elected branch 
of the family, and was probably of that 
stock which became at last the worst of 
idolaters, the Edomites. That the country 
in which he lived was in his time infected 
witli an incipient idolatry, appears from 
the mention that he makes of the worship 
F 3 



70 



of the sun and moon as a crime with which 
he was himself untainted ; a circumstance 
from which he could have pretended no 
merit, had not the prevailing fashion of his 
country and his times presented a strong 
temptation to the crime. And as there is 
no mention of any other kind of idolatry 
in the book of Job, it is reasonable to con- 
clude that in his time the corruption had 
gone no greater length. 

Now, that Job was a prophet is so uni- 
versally confessed, that it is needless to 
dwell upon the proof of it. He was a pro- 
phet in the declining age of the patriarchal 
church, in the interval between Esau, from 
whom he was descended, and Moses, whose 
time he preceded ; and he prophesied in 
an idolatrous country, where the sun and 
moon were worshipped. 

In this idolatrous country he prophesied 
of the Redeemer ; and it is a circumstance 



71 



that deserves particular attention, that he 
prophesies of the Redeemer, not without 
manifest allusion to the divinity of his 
nature, and express mention of the resur- 
rection of the body as the effect of his 
redemption ; — two articles of our creed 
which, we are told with great confidence, 
are modern innovations ; whereas we find 
them not only in the Jewish prophets, but 
in far more ancient prophets of a more 
ancient church. 

"I know," saith Job, " that my Re- 
" deemer liveth ; I know that he now 
" liveth that is, that his nature is to live. 
He describes the Redeemer, you see, in 
language much allied to that in which 
Jehovah describes his own nature in the 
conference with Moses at the bush. Jeho- 
vah describes himself by his uncaused exist- 
ence ; Job describes the Redeemer by a life 
inseparable from his essence. " I know 

F 4 



72 



" that in the latter days this ever-living Re- 
" deemer shall stand upon the earth. He 
" shall take up his residence among men 
" in an embodied form ; God shall be ma- 
" nifested in the flesh to destroy the works 
" of the Devil : He shall stand upon , the 
" earth in the latter days ; in the last period 
" of the world's existence which implies 
that this standing of the Redeemer upon 
the earth will close the great scheme of 
Providence for man's restoration : " And 
" although he shall not stand upon the 
" earth before the latter days, yet I know 
" that he is my Redeemer ; that my death, 
" which must take place many ages before 
" his appearance, will not exclude me 
" from my share in his redemption. For 
" though after my skin worms destroy 

this body, yet in my flesh shall I see 
" God. Though nothing will be then re- 

maining of my external person, though 



73 

" the form of this body will have been long 
" destroyed, the organization of its consti- 
" tuent parts demolished, and its very sub- 
" stance dissipated, the softer part become 
" the food of worms bred in its own putre- 
" faction, the solid bones moulded into 
" powder ; notwithstanding this ruin of my 
" outward fabric, the immortal principle 
within me shall not only survive, but its 
decayed mansion will be restored. It 
" will be re-united to a body, of which the 
" organs will not only connect it with the 
" external world, but serve to cement its 
" union with its Maker. For in my flesh, 
" with the corporeal eye, with the eye of 
" the immortal body which I shall then 
" assume, I shall see the divine Majesty in 
" the person of the glorified Redeemer." 

Such was the tenor of Job's prophecies, 
of a prophet of the Gentiles ; and such was 
the light which God granted to the Gentile 



74 



world in the first stage of its corruption. 
And that this light was not withdrawn till 
the corruption attained its height, we learn 
from the second instance, the Aramaean 
prophet Balaam. 

What might be the exact degree of the 
degeneracy in Balaam's country, I cannot 
take upon me to determine. But the bor- 
dering nation, the Moabites, were addicted 
to that gross idolatry which made homicide 
and prostitution an essential part of its re- 
ligious rites. From the extreme depravity 
of the times, and from the wickedness 
of Balaam's own character, it has been 
doubted whether he was properly a pro- 
phet. It has been imagined that he might 
be a sorcerer, who practised some wicked 
arts of magical divination, and owed his 
fame to the casual success of some of his 
predictions ; that those remarkable pro- 
phecies which he delivered when Balak 



75 



called him to curse the Israelites, were 
the result of an extraordinary impulse 
vipon his mind upon that particular occa- 
sion, and no more prove that the gift of 
prophecy was a permanent endowment of 
his mind, as it was in Job and the Jewish 
prophets, than the speaking of his ass 
upon the same occasion proves that the 
animal had a permanent use of the faculty 
of speech. 

The difficulty of conceiving that true 
prophets should be found in an idolatrous 
nation, if I mistake not, I have already 
removed, by the analogy which I have 
shown to subsist between ancient and mo- 
dern corruptions. The difficulty of con- 
ceiving that the gift of prophecy should be 
imparted to a wicked character, will be 
much softened, if not entirely removed, if 
we recollect the confessed crimes of some 
of the Jewish prophets, and the confessed 



76 



indiscretions of some persons who shared 
in the miraculous gifts of the Spirit in the 
primitive churches. And if once we admit, 
as the evidence of plain fact compels us to 
admit, that the gift of prophecy is not 
always in proportion to the moral worth 
of the character, we must confess it to be 
a question which is beyond the ability of 
liuman reason to decide, in what propor- 
tion they must necessarily correspond, or 
with what degree of depravity in the moral 
character the prophetic talent may be in- 
compatible. Balaam's impiety at last ran 
to the length of open rebellion against God; 
for he suggested to the king of Moab, as 
the only means by which the fortunes of 
the Israelites, could be injured, the infernal 
stratagem of enticing them to take a part 
in that idolatry for which, by the tenor of 
his own predictions, the Moabites were 
destined to destruction. But this apos- 



77 



tacy of Balaam's was subsequent to the 
prophecies that he delivered to Balak, and 
was the effect of the temptation which the 
occasion presented, the offer of riches and 
preferment in Balak's court. It is pro- 
bable, indeed, that his heart had never been 
right with God, or these objects could not 
have laid hold of him so forcibly. But 
this, for any thing that appears from the 
sacred history, might be his first act of 
open impiety and rebellion ; and the con- 
clusion, that in the former part of his life 
he had been too bad a man to be honoured 
with the prophetic gift, is precarious. The 
circumstances of the story are of far more 
weight than any reasoning built upon such 
precarious principles as man's notion of 
the manner in which the divine gift should 
be distributed ; and, from the circumstances 
of the story, it appears that he was a true 
prophet of the true God. When Balak's 



78 



messengers first came to him, he speaks the 
language of one who had the fear of God 
habitually upon his mind. He disclaims 
all power of his own to bless or curse, to 
take any step in the business but under 
God's express direction and permission. 
He must have God's leave to go to Balak ; 
and when he comes to Balak, he must take 
heed to speak what Jehovah puts into his 
mouth. Although Balak would give him 
his house full of silver and gold, he could not 
transgress the word of Jehovah Ms God, to 
do less or more. This was his language in 
the ordinary state of his mind, when he 
was under no prophetic impulse ; and it 
is remarkable that he speaks of God in the 
same terms which were afterwards in use 
among the Jewish prophets : " Jehovah 
" my God,'' " Jehovah, the God whose pro- 
" phet am 1." In ecstasy he expresses the 
same sentiments in a more figured lan- 
3* 



79 



guage. He describes his own faculty of 
prediction in images the most exactly ex- 
pressive of the prophetic gifts and the pro- 
phetic office ; expressive of no singular 
unexampled impulse upon this occasion, 
but of frequent and habitual intercourse 
with the Most High God, by voice and 
visions, in dream and in trance. 

It is very remarkable, that in the strain 
of these predictions there is no indication 
of that violent constraint which some have 
imagined upon the mind of the speaker, 
or that he was more a necessary agent than 
any other prophet under the divine im- 
pulse. In every instance of prophecy by 
divine inspiration, thoughts and images 
were presented to the prophet's mind by 
the inspiring Spirit, which no meditation 
or study of his own could have suggested ; 
and therefore the mind of the man under 
this influence might properly be considered 



80 



as a machine in the hand of God. Yet 
the will of the man in this, as in every in- 
stance in which man acts under the con- 
trol of Providence, seems to have been 
the spring by which the machine was put 
in motion. 

And though iii conceiving the prophecy 
the man was passive, in uttering it he was 
a free and voluntary agent ; which appears 
from this circumstance, that the prophet 
had it in his choice to dissemble and pre- 
varicate, to utter smooth things, and to pro- 
phesy deceits. And this was Balaam's 
situation when he tells Balak's messen- 
gers that he cannot go beyond the word of 
Jehovah his God ; that what God should 
put in his mouth, that he must speak. It 
is not that his organs of speech were not 
upon these occasions in his own command, 
that they were determined by some other 
principle than his own will to the utterance 



81 



of certain words which might convey cer- 
tain thoughts, but that he had no power 
of uttering true predictions, of pronounc- 
ing either blessing or curse that might 
prove effectual, otherwise than as he spake 
in conformity to the divine motions ; and 
the alacrity and ardour of his prophetic 
strains indicate a satisfaction and compla- 
cency of his own mind in uttering his con- 
ceptions. 

There is one passage in his second song, 
which, as it lies in the English Bibles, may 
seem to contradict this assertion : " Be- 
" hold I have received commandment to 
" bless, and he hath blessed, and I cannot 
" reverse it." Which ma} seem to say, 
that if he could^ he would have reversed the 
blessing. But the original, according to the 
reading of the best manuscripts, expresses 
a very different sentiment : " Behold, id 
" bless was I brought hither, {brought^ not 



82 



" by Balak's invitation, but by God), to 
" bless was I brought hither. I will bless, 
" and I will not decline it." And the same 
sense appears in the Greek translation of 
the Septuagint ; and, accordingly, he pro- 
nounces his blessing without reserve or re- 
luctance. He discovers no unwillingness 
to paint the prosperity of the Jewish nation 
in the highest colours, no concern for the 
calamities that awaited their enemies ; and 
in his last effusions, his mind seems to enjoy 
the great scene that was before him, of the 
happiness and glory of the Messiah's reign, 
and the final extermination of idolaters. 

Another circmnstance to be remarked is, 
that no traces of idolatrous superstition or 
magical enchantment appear in the rites 
which were used upon this occasion. We 
read, indeed, that after the third sacrifice, 
" he went not, as at other times, to seek en- 
" chantments." Some have taken alarm at 



83 



the word enchantments^ taking it in a bad 
sense. No conclusion can be drawn from 
a passage so obscure, as all who are versed 
in the Hebrew language must confess this 
to be in the original. The words which 
are rendered " as at other times/' seem not 
to allude, as these English words should do, 
to something that had been Balaam's ordi- 
nary practice upon former occasions, but 
to what he had done before upon thu oc- 
casion. " He went not as from time to 
" time before;" or, " he went not as he had 
" done once and again, to seek enchant- 
" ments." What these enchantments might 
be which he went to seek, since it cannot 
be determined by the mere force of the 
word enchantments^ may be best conjec- 
tured by considering what Balaam had done 
once and again upon the present occasion. 

Now once and again after each of the 
first sacrifices he retired to a solitary place. 

G 2 



84 



And what sought he in this retirement ? 
What he sought may be divined by what 
he met with. He met God, and God put 
a word in his mouth ; and this the third 
time Balaam did not. He staid with Balak 
and the Moabitic chiefs in the place where 
the third sacrifice had been performed, 
patiently waiting the event, with his face 
toward the wilderness, where the Israelite 
army lay encamped. These enchantments, 
therefore, which once and again he went 
to seek, and which the third time he sought 
not, were, as it should seem, no idolatrous 
or magical enchantments, but either some 
stated rights of invocation of the inspiring 
spirit which he practised in retirement, or, 
as I rather think, some sensible signs by 
which, in the early ages of the w^orld, God 
was pleased to communicate with his pro- 
phets; some voice or vision. His pre- 
paratory rite wa^, that in each place where 



85 



he took his station he directed the king of 
Moab to make seven altars, and to offer 
seven bullocks and seven rams. In this 
there is nothing of idolatry, but every cir- 
cumstance is characteristic of a solemn 
sacrifice to the true God. The altars were 
raised expressly for the particular purpose 
of this sacrifice. He used no altar that was 
ready made, lest it should have been pro- 
faned by offerings to the idols of the country. 
And being raised in a hurry upon the spot, 
they could not be durable or stately erections 
of workmanship and art (such altars as the 
Israelites were permitted to erect,) but sim- 
ple mounds of earth, or heaps of unpolish- 
ed stone, which could not long remain after 
they had served the present solemn busi- 
ness, to be afterwards profaned by idola- 
trous sacrifices. 

Some have suspected something of ido- 
latrous superstition in the number of the 

G 3 



86 



altars and of the victims. On the contrary, 
I am persuaded, that the choice of the 
number seven was a solemn and significant 
appropriation of the offerings to the Su- 
preme God the Maker of the world. The 
last business in the book of Job, when 
the great argument between Job and his 
friends is brought to a conclusion, is a so- 
lemn sacrifice, not devised by Job or any 
of his friends, but prescribed by the express 
voice of God, And this sacrifice, like Ba- 
laam's, consists of seven bullocks and of 
seven rams. It should seem, therefore, that 
in the earliest ages it was a characteristic 
rite of the pure patriarchal worship to sa- 
crifice on occasions of great solemnity by 
sevens. The key to this rite is the insti- 
tution of the Sabbath. The observance of 
the seventh day was the sacrament of the 
ancient church ; of that church, which was 
more ancient than the Jewish ; of that 



87 



priesthood, which was more dignified than 
Aaron's ; of the church of Adam before 
the flood ; of the church of Noah after it* 
For the same reason that the seventh day 
was sanctified, the victims bled by sevens ; 
and to sacrifice seven rams or seven bul- 
locks at a time, was to declare that the of- 
fering was made to that God who created 
the world in six days, and to whose service 
the seventh day was therefore consecrated. 
Upon the same principle it was that much 
of the Jewish ritual was governed by the 
number seven. The golden candlestick 
had seven branches supporting seven burn- 
ing lamps. When atonement was to be 
made for the sin of a priest or of the con- 
gregation, the vail was to be sprinkled 
seven times with the blood of the offering, 
and the mercy-seat was to be sprinkled 
seven times on the great day of annual ex- 
piation. The festivals of the Jews were 

G 4 



88 



celebrated each for seven days succes- 
sively, and among the extraordinary sacri- 
fices of each day were seven or twice seven 
lambs. When the ark of the covenant was 
brought from the house of Obed-Edom to 
Jerusalem, the sacrifice on that great occa- 
sion was seven bullocks and seven rams. 
Perhaps, in a much later age than Balaam's, 
the number of his altars and his victims 
would have afforded no certain character 
of a pure worship ; for in the later ages of 
idolatry we find a superstitious veneration 
for the number seven among the heathens. 
But thus it is with all ceremonies, that their 
significance depends upon the interpret- 
ation which custom makes of them. And 
the interpretation of the same ceremony 
will be different, according, to the different 
state of opinions in different countries and 
at different times. Hence what was ori- 
ginally an act of pure devotion, may "fee- 



89 



come, in later times, a superstitious rite. 
The stone which Jacob erected at Bethel, 
became afterwards an occasion of idolatry. 
So, to offer animals by sevens was no longer 
an appropriation of the sacrifice to the in- 
visible Creator, when it could no longer be 
understood to allude to that particular cir- 
cumstance in the creation, that it was 
finished in six days. And to this no allu- 
sion could be understood, where the cir- 
cumstance itself was not remembered. 
But this hinders not but that in the days 
of Balaam, who lived within a century of 
Job, the same ceremonies had the same 
meaning in Balaam's worship as in Job's ; 
and that the number of his altars and his 
victims, was a circumstance which in that 
age gave a public character to his sacrifice, 
by which Balak and his princes, and the 
confederate armies of Moab and Midian, 
might understand that it was offered in 



90 



contempt of their idols, and in honour of 
the God who rested from the business of 
creation on the seventh day. 

Now, when all these circumstances are 
put together ; the age of Balaam, that he 
lived within a century after Job ; his 
country, which was in the neighbourhood 
of Job's, — part at least of a tract which was 
occupied by descendants of Abraham, or 
by collateral branches of the family ; his 
open acknowledgment of Jehovah as his 
God; that both in his ordinary state of 
mind and under the divine impulse, he 
refers his prophetic talent to the inspiration' * 
of Jehovah ; that he disclaims any power 
of his own to bless or to curse, otherwise 
than as the interpreter of the counsels of 
Heaven ; that he practises no magical en- 
chantments, but offers sacrifices to God 
after the patriarchal rites ; that in uttering 
his predictions he appears not to have 



91 



been more a necessary agent than every 
other prophet : when to all these circum- 
stances we add, that he uttered a true pro- 
phecy, a prophecy extending, if I read its 
meaning aright, from his own time to the 
Messiah's second advent ; a prophecy 
which in every part which relates to times 
which are now gone by, hath been fulfilled 
with wonderful exactness, and in other 
parts which relate to ages yet to come, 
harmonizes with the predictions of the Jew- 
ish prophets and of the Apocalypse;- — can 
a doubt remain, that the man who, to all 
secondary characters of a prophet, added 
this great character, that by a divine im- 
pulse, as is confessed, he delivered a pro- 
phecy of things too distant to fall within 
any man's natural foresight; a prophecy 
which the world hath seen in part accom- 
plished, and which, in its other parts, re- 
sembles other prophecies not yet aceom- 



92 



plished, but confessedly divine ; a pro- 
phecy which, for the variety of its compo- 
sition in its various parts, for the aptness, 
the beauty, the majesty, the horror of its 
images, may compare with the most ani- 
mated effusions of the Hebrew bards ; can 
a doubt remain whether this man, with all 
the imperfections of his private character, 
was a true prophet? 

I am not ignorant that Origen, and other 
divines of ancient and modern times, have 
been unwilling to acknowledge his preten- 
sions. If their authority should seem to 
outweigh the evidence drawn from the 
particulars of his story, I have a greater 
authority to produce against them, the 
authority of an inspired apostle. " The 
dumb ass," saith St Peter, alluding to 
Balaam's story, " the dumb ass, speaking 
" with man's voice, forbade the madness of 
" the prophet ;" acknowledging him, you 



93 



see, for a prophet, though, for the foll^y of 
foving the wages of unrighteousness, he 
calls him mad. 

Balaam therefore was a prophet ; for, 
with the evidence of facts and the autho- 
rity of an inspired apostle on our side, we 
will be confident in the assertion, though 
Origen and Calvin be against us. Balaam 
was a prophet. He lived in an age of 
gross idolatry, and prophesied to idolaters. 
In him, as I conceive, the prophetic order 
without the pale of the Mosaic church, 
which was now formed, was extinguished ; 
for I find no traces in history, sacred or 
profane, of a true prophet out of Israel 
after the death of Balaam. He fell, you 
know, in the general carnage of the Mi- 
dianites, and was himself among the first 
instances of God's vengeance on apostates. 
It is probable, therefore, that the prophecies 
which he delivered at Shittim were the last 



94 



that were addressed to the old patriarchal 
church, now corrupt in the extreme, and 
on the verge of dissolution^ It is remark- 
able that this church should be admonish- 
ed by the last words of her last prophet, of 
the impending vengeance, as the Jewish 
church, by a greater prophet, within a few 
years of her dissolution was admonished 
of her fate. It is remarkable that this last 
call of God to that apostatizing church 
should be the first occasion, upon record 
at least, upon which the Messiah is de- 
scribed in images of terror, as a warlike 
prince reducing the world by conquest, 
and putting his vanquished enemies to the 
sword. With these predictions of the 
Messiah, (predictions which, by all expasi- 
tors, Jews as well as Christian, by Rabbis 
of later times, as well as by the more can- 
did and more knowing Jews of earlier ages, 
are understood of the Messiah), with these 



95 



predictions, Balaam intermixes many brief 
but eloquent assertions of the first prin- 
ciples of natural religion : — The omnipo- 
tence of the Deity, his universal provi- 
dence, and the immutabilitv of his coun- 
sels. And, to be a standing monument of 
these great truths, he leaves a very ge- 
neral but very exact prediction of the 
fortunes of the empires and kingdoms 
that were at that time the most consid- 
erable, and of those that in succeeding 
ages were successively to arise and perish 
in their turns. And his images bear all 
the analogy to those of later prophets, of 
Daniel in particular, and the sublime au- 
thor of the Apocalypse, which the lan- 
guage of a general sketch can bear to that 
of a minute detail ; and the names and 
epithets which he applies to the Supreme 
Being are the very same which are used 
by Moses, Job, and the inspired writers 



96 



of the Jews; namel}^, God^ the Ahnighty^ 
the Mod High, and Jehovah; which is a 
proof, that gross as the corruptions of ido- 
latry were now become, the patriarchal 
religion was not sufficiently forgotten for 
its language to be grown obsolete. 

In this Balaam set the sun of prophecy 
in the horizon of the Gentile world, and 
yet a total night came not. For some 
ages a twilight glimmered in their sky, 
which gradually decayed, and became at 
last almost insensible, but began to bright- 
en again during the captivity of the Jews 
under the Babylonian monarchs, and from 
that period continued to gather strength, 
till at length the morning star took its sta- 
tion over the stable at Bethlehem. The 
Sun of righteousness arose to set no more, 
and the light again was clear and univer- 
sah 



97 



You will recollect what I advanced as a 
probable conjecture in a former part of 
these disquisitions, that upon the first ap- 
pearance of idolatry, when the uninfected 
part of mankind would be taking all means 
to check the progress of the contagion, 
the traditional history of the creation, the 
deluge, and the promises to the first patri- 
archs, which at that time would probably 
be pretty perfect, would be committed to 
writing. We may assert, I think, with 
more certainty, that the prophecies of Job 
and Balaam, and of other prophets of that 
period, if any other existed, (and many 
might, although their works and their very 
names have been long since forgotten) ; it 
is more certain, I say, of the prophecies of 
these ages, that they would be committed 
to writing, than of the earlier traditions. 
For that letters were older than the begin- 
nings of idolatry cannot be proved, though, 

H 



98 



in my opinion, it is more probable than 
the contrary. Whereas it is certain, not 
only that the Israelites had letters before 
the law, but that books and writing were 
in use in the days of Job, in that part of 
the country where Job and Balaam lived ; 
and if in use in the days of Job, certainly 
not out of use in the later days of Balaam. 
For although religion in these ages was 
upon the decline, arts and sciences were in 
a stage of progress and advancement. — 
That Balaam's prophecies, at Shittim in 
particular, were committed to writing 
among the Moabites and the Midianites, 
is, I think, incontestable. For to the Moab- 
ites and Midianites they were delivered, 
not within hearing of the Israelites, And 
how did Moses, who heard them not, come 
by the knowledge of them, unless it were 
that they were committed to writing, and 
that the books of the Moabites or the Mi- 



99 



dianites fell into the conqueror's hands? 
Moses, it is true, was an inspired writer, 
which may seem to some to account suffi- 
ciently for his knowledge of every thing 
that he relates. 

But God, even in the more immediate 
interpositions of his providence, acts by 
natural means and second causes, so far as 
natural means and second causes may be 
made to serve the purpose. The influ- 
ence, therefore, of the inspiring Spirit on 
the mind of an historian, can be nothing 
more than to secure him from mistake 
and falsity, by strengthening his memory, 
and by maintaining in his heart a reli- 
gious love and reverence for truth, that be 
may be incapable of omission through 
forgetfulness, and may be invincibly forti- 
fied against all temptations to forge, con- 
ceal, disguise, or prevaricate. That inspi- 
ration ever was the means of conveying 

H 2 



100 



the first knowledge of facts to an histo- 
rian's mind, is a very unreasonable suppo- 
sition. It is to suppose an unnecessary 
miracle. For a miracle is always unne- 
cessary where natural means might serve 
the purpose. And the supposition of an 
unnecessary miracle is always an unrea- 
sonable, and indeed a dangerous suppo- 
sition. Unreasonable, because no evi- 
dence can prove it, and no plausible argu- 
ment can be alleged for it; dangerous, be- 
cause it leads to an unlimited and perni- 
cious credulity. We coaclude, therefore, 
that Balaam's prophecies at Shittim were 
committed to writing by the people to 
whom they were delivered, because they 
are recorded by the inspired historian^ to 
whom they were not delivered, who could 
not by any other means have come to the 
knowledge of them, and who, by virtue of 
his inspiration, was incapable of the dis- 

9 



101 



honest act of forging facts of which he had 
no knowledge. But further, it appears 
from another inspired writer of the Jewish 
Church, that other authentic accounts of 
Balaam's prophecies at Shittim, besides 
that which Moses had transmitted, was cur- 
rent among the Jews in a very late agey 
which contained some particulars which 
Moses, as foreign to the subject of his his- 
tory, has omitted. Moses has preserved 
the public predictions which related to the 
fortunes of the Israelites and their adver- 
saries in all ages, and to the universally in- 
teresting subject of the Messiah. 
- These other accounts contained the par- 
ticulars of a private conference between 
Balaam and Balak, in which the idolatrous 
king inquires of God's prophet, in what 
way he the king might make expiation for 
his offences. " Remember, O my people," 
saith the prophet Micah, what Balak 

H 3 



102 



" king of Moab consulted, and what Ba- 
" laam the son of Beor answered him, from 
" Shittim unto Gilgal." And then he relates 
the conference. The word remember evi- 
dently refers the Israelites of Micah's time to 
some account of this conference which they 
might remember, which they ought to have 
holden in remembrance. Which account, 
in the judgment of Micah, who thus so- 
lemnly appeals to it, was authentic, and 
we must believe it to be authentic upon 
the credit of Micah's inspiration. Now 
what could this be but some written re- 
cords of the prophecies at Shittim, trans- 
mitted from the times of Balaam, which 
must have come to the Israelites, as the 
other account came to them, from the ori- 
ginal books of the Moabites ? 

Balaam's prophecies at Shittim, therefore, 
were committed to writing among the peo- 
ple to whom they were first delivered. If 



103 



these prophecies, why not earlier prophe- 
cies of Balaam's ? for that these were not 
the first and only prophecies, appears from 
the reputation he held as a prophet when 
the war between Balak and the Israelites 
broke out. 

If Balaam's prophecies, why not those 
of earlier prophets ? The idolatry of the 
age in which they lived would not prevent 
it ; for idolatry is always superstitious, 
and superstition would receive without dis- 
tinction whatever went under the name 
of a prophecy, especially if the style in 
which it was conceived might at all suit 
with its pretensions. Accordingly we fi:ndy 
that idolaters were not at all deficient 
in their veneration for the true prophets. 
It was rather their error, that without 
distinguishing between the true prophet 
and the false, they entertained an extra- 
vagant respect for both, ascribing to them 

H 4 



104 



not only a foresight, but a command of 
futurity. This unreasonable belief in the 
prophet, not as the messenger, but as the 
assessor of the gods, sharing their power 
rather than declaring their will, was itself a 
branch of idolatry, even when the true pro- 
phet was the object of it. But the conse- 
quence of this superstition would be, that 
all prophecies, true and false, would be 
promiscuously recorded. At first, perhaps, 
while idolatry, in Shem's family at least, 
was the crime of individuals only, and the 
true worship of God had the support of 
the civil magistrate; (and in the country 
where Job and Balaam lived, the first pub- 
lic defection must have taken place in the 
interval between Job and Balaam; for, in 
Job's time, the first and mildest species of 
idolatry, the worship of the sun and moon, 
was an iniquity punished by the judge). 
While this state of things continued, pro- 



105 



phecies would be added from time to time, 
as they were delivered, to those earlier 
collections of sacred history, which, if our 
conjecture be admitted that they existed, 
would probably be in the custody of the 
priests. 

If no collections of history of the anti- 
quity we have supposed existed, the first 
prophecies that were committed to writing 
would form a sacred volume, which un- 
questionably would be committed to the 
care of the priests, whose office it would 
be to add to it from time to time any later 
prophecies that might seem of sufficient 
importance to be registered in the archives 
of the church ; for this is agreeable to what 
we find to have been in later ages the uni- 
versal practice of all nations. 

Among all nations certain books, from the 
supposed authenticity of early records and 
pretended oracles which they contain, have 



106 



been holden in religious veneration ; and 
these have ever been preserved in the 
temples under the care of the priests, who 
from time to time have added such new- 
matter as to themselves and the civil rulers 
might seem of sufficient moment to chal- 
lenge a place in these sacred registers. 
We have an instance of this practice among 
God's people ; for when Joshua, some 
little time before his death, by his last pa- 
thetic exhortation to the general assembly 
of the tribes of Israel, had brought the 
people to a solemn renewal of their vows 
of obedience to Jehovah, he wrote the story 
of the whole transaction in the book of the 
law of God. He added this narrative to 
the sacred volume of the law, which, by 
Moses' express command, was deposited 
in the sanctuary on one side of the ark of 
the covenant. Now, while the priests and 
the magistrates were themselves free from 



107 



any idolatrous taint, the sacred books in 
their custody would suffer no wilful cor- 
ruption. But when the keepers of these 
books became themselves infected with 
idolatrous superstition, they would not 
lose their veneration for writings which 
had long been esteemed divine, nor would 
they be so hardy as to destroy any part of 
the original deposit, or even to make any 
considerable alterations in the text, how- 
ever unfavourable it might be to the new 
system in the interests of which they were 
now engaged. The contrariety would not 
be perceived, nor would such measures be 
taken to abolish it. Priestcraft indeed is 
politic and daring, but simple superstition 
is both timid and indiscreet. Priestcraft 
was the growth of later ages, and the con- 
sequence of a further corruption. For 
priestcraft, which is a cunning manage- 
ment of the superstitions of the people for 



108 



the temporal advantage of the priesthood, 
supposes a priesthood itself free of super- 
stition, and was never known in the world 
till the Gentile priests of sincere idolaters 
(if the expression may be allowed) became 
infidels. Simple superstition was the first 
stage of the corruption among priests, no 
less than laics ; and simple superstition 
hath no freedom in the pursuit of ends, no 
determination in the choice of means, but 
is the slave of fear and habit. 

Habit therefore previously formed would, 
for some time, preserve a respect for the 
records of the ancient church, when the 
pure religion was forsaken. And while 
this habit operated, fear would prevent any 
corruptions of them by wilful mutilation, 
changes or erasures. They would be 
liable however to a corruption of another 
kind. The priests receiving false oracles 
with no less veneration than the true, and 



109 



zealous for the credit of superstitious rites 
of worship, would make large additions of 
fable to the historic part, and of feigned 
predictions of impostors to the prophetic. 
Still the original true history and true pro- 
phecy would be preserved, and, blended 
with the false, would, from age to age, 
while the corruption lasted, be carefully 
laid up under the care of the priests, and 
make a part of the treasures of the heathen 
temples. 

Nor is the strange mixture of sense and 
absurdity, of rational religion and impious 
superstition, which appear in the lives and 
opinions of the wiser heathens, to be traced 
with equal probability to any other source. 

The purest morals in the ordinary life, 
joined with obscene and impious rites of 
worship ; a just notion of the moral attri- 
butes of the Deity, accompanied with a 
belief in the subordinate power of impure 



110 



and cruel daemons ; a clear understanding 
of the nature of the human mind as an im- 
material substance and a voluntary agent, 
connected with a persuasion of the in- 
fluence of the stars on the affairs of men, 
not only in the revolutions and commo- 
tions of empires, but on the private for- 
tunes of every individual. These were the 
inconsistencies, not only of the popular 
creed and of the popular practice, but of 
the creed and of the practice of the wisest 
and the best of their philosophers. So- 
crates himself, pure as his morality and 
sublime as his theology were, so far as the 
supreme God was their object, worshipped 
the gods of his country according to the 
established rites.^ 

Now, how may we account for these 
contradictions in the opinions, and these 



♦ That he died a martyr to the doctrine of the unity 
of the divine substance, is a vulgar error. 



Ill 



inconsistencies in the conduct, of wise and 
conscientious men ; for such, it must be con- 
fessed, many of the heathen philosophers 
were, notwithstanding the abuse which 
is sometimes so Uberally bestowed upon 
them by ignorant declaimers. Whence 
was it, that the same men should practise 
rational devotion in the closet, and come 
abroad to join in a rank superstition ? that 
they should form themselves to the general 
habits of sobriety and temperance, and 
yet occasionally partake of the indecent 
liberties of a Greek festival ? unless it was 
that they found the principles of true reli- 
gion and the rites of an idolatrous worship 
established on what appeared to them the 
same authority, upon the credit of their 
sacred books, in which both were alike in- 
culcated; books, to which they could not 
but allow some authority, at the same time 
that they had no certain means of distin- 



112 



guishing the authentic part from later and 
corrupt additions. Be that as it may, 
whether this might be the true source of 
that inconsistency of principle and practice 
which was so striking in the lives of vir- 
tuous heathens, and is really a phenome- 
non in the history of mankind, (which I 
mention, only because it affords a collateral 
argument for the truth of perhaps the only 
supposition by which it may be satisfacto- 
rily explained) ; the existence of such books 
as I have described, composed of fable 
joined with true history, and of false pro- 
phecies of great antiquity added to more 
ancient predictions of God's true prophets, 
will hardly bear a doubt. Since it is the 
necessary consequence of principles which 
cannot reasonably be disputed, that in 
early ages the worshippers of the true God 
would use all means to preserve the me- 
mory of the first revelations, and that the 



113 



first idolaters retaining a blind veneration 
for these antient collections, when they no 
longer knew the real importance of them, 
would not be less careful to preserve the 
false oracles in which they equally believed. 
If such books existed, it cannot bear a 
doubt that they made the ground-work of 
all the idolatrous worship of later ages, and, 
together with the corruption, were the 
means of perpetuating some disguised and, 
obscure remembrance of true prophecies. 
So wonderfully hath Providence over-ruled 
the follies and the crimes of men, render- 
ing them the instruments of his own pur- 
pose, and the means of general and lasting 
good. It was to the remains of these books, 
which I have shown you to have been in 
fact the corrupted and mutilated records of 
the patriarchal church, that the Greek phi- 
losophers were probably indebted for those 
fragments of the patriarchal creed, from 



114 

which they drew the just notions that we 
find scattered in their writings, of the im- 
mortah'ty of the soul, a future retribution, 
the unity of the divine substance, and 
even of the trinity of persons. For of this 
the sages of the Pythagorean and Platonic 
schools had some obscure and distorted 
apprehensions. And to no other source 
can w^e refer the expectation that prevailed 
in the heathen world at large, of a great 
personage to arise in some part of the East 
for the general advantage of mankind. 

And in this I think you will now agree 
with me, if you bear in mind the fact that 
I set out with proving, from historical evi- 
dence, that certain books, which were pre- 
served as a sacred treasure in the heathen 
temples, contained explicit prophecies of 
Christ ; which are more likely to have been 
antient prophecies preserved in the man- 
ner I have described, though iiot without 



115 



a mixture of corruption, for which, too, I 
have accounted, than the involuntary effu- 
sions of the impostors of later ages, occa- 
sionally uttering true predictions under a 
compulsive influence of the divine Spirit : 
an opinion which, I am persuaded, would 
never have been adopted, had not the 
severe notions that too long prevailed of an 
original reprobation of the greater part of 
mankind, made men unwilling to believe 
that heathens could be in possession of the 
smallest particle of true prophecy, and of 
course cut off all enquiry after the means 
by which it might be conveyed to them. 
Beside that, in all questions of difficulty, 
as this must be confessed to be, men are 
apt rather to consult their ease, by taking 
up with the first plausible solution their 
invention may devise, than to submit 
to the labour of an accurate investigation 
of facts, and a circumspect deduction of 

I 2 



116 



consequences. The fact, however, that 
books were preserved hi the heathen tem- 
ples which contain ed true prophecies of 
Christ, rests, as I have shown you, upon 
the highest historical evidence. Nor does it 
rest alone upon the contents of those books 
which were preserved at Rome under the 
name of the Oracles of the Cumaean Sibyl; 
the same perhaps might be established by 
another work, which was of no less autho- 
rity in the East, where it passed for the 
work of Hystaspes, a Persian Magus of 
high antiquity. I forbear, however, to ex- 
haust your patience by pushing the enquiry 
any farther, and shall now dismiss the sub- 
ject by cautioning you, not to take alarm 
at the names of a Sibyl or a Magus. I 
assert, not that any of the fabled Sibyls of 
the old mythology uttered true prophecies, 
but that some of the prophecies which 
were ascribed to Sibyls were true pro- 



Ill 

phecies, which the ignorant heathens 
ascribed to those fabulous personages, 
when the true origin of them was forgot- 
ten. For Hystaspes, I will not too confi- 
dently assert that he was not the compiler 
of the writings which were current under 
his name ; but I conceive he was only the 
compiler from originals of high authority. 
And a Magus, in the old sense of the word, 
had nothing in common with the impostors 
that are now called magicians. The Magi 
were wise men who applied themselves to 
the study of nature and religion. The re- 
ligion of the Persians in the latest age that 
can be given to Hystaspes, if it was at 
all tainted with idolatry, was only tainted 
in the first degree. And even in much 
later times Eastern Magi were the first 
worshippers of Mary's holy Child ; which 
should remove any prejudice the name of 
a Magus might create. 

1 3 



FOUR DISCOURSES 

ON THE 

NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 

BY WHICH THE FACT 

OF OUR LORD'S RESURRECTION 

IS ESTABLISHED. , 



I 4 



SERMON I. 



Acts, x. 40,41. 

Him God raised up the third day, and 
" showed him openly ; not to all the 
'^people, but to xmtnesses chosen before 
''of God:' 

The pomp and pillar of the Christian's 
hope, (which being once removed the en- 
tire building would give way), is the great 
event which w^e at this season commemo- 
rate, the resurrection of our Lord ; inso- 
much that the evidence of that fact may 
properly be considered as the seal of his 
pretensions, and of the expectation of his 



122 



followers. If^ notwithstanding the pure 
and holy life which Jesus led, the subli- 
mity of the doctrine which he taught, and 
the natural excellence of the duties which 
he enjoyed : if, after all the miracles which 
he performed, he was at last forsaken of 
the God to whose service his life had been 
devoted, if his soul at last v/as left in hell, 
and the Holy One of God was suffered, 
like a common man, to become the prey 
of worms and putrefaction, then truly is 
our preaching vain, and your faith is vain. 
It is to no purpose that we exhort you to 
sacrifice present interest to future hopes ; 
to renounce the gratifications of sense for 
those promised enjoyments in the presence 
of God ; to rely on his atonement for the 
pardon of involuntary offences ; and to 
trust to a continual supply of the Holy 
Spirit, proportioned to the temptations 
which the world presents. It is to no pur- 



123 



pose that ye submit to a life of mortifica- 
tion and constraint, of warfare with the 
world, and of conflict with the sensual ap- 
petite : It is to no purpose that ye stand 
in jeopardy every hour, in painful appre- 
hension of the wiles of the great deceiver, 
the treachery of your own unguarded 
hearts, and the sallies of unconquered 
appetites. If Christ be not risen from 
" the dead," all promises that are made to 
you in his name are vain, and the con- 
tempt of the present world is folly. If 
Christ be not risen from the dead, the con- 
sequence must either be, that he was an 
impostor^ and that his whole doctrine was 
a fraud ; or, if the purity of his life might 
still screen him from so foul an imputation, 
and the truth of his pretensions be sup- 
posed consistent with a failure of his predic- 
tions in the most important article, you 
would only have in him a discouraging 



124 



example of how little estimation in the 
sight of God, is the utmost height of virtue 
to which human nature can attain. If 
neither the unspotted sanctity of our Sa- 
viour's character, nor his intimate union 
with the first principle of life itself, could 
give him a deliverance from the bonds of 
death, what hope for us who have neither 
claim nor plea but what is founded on the 
value of the Redeemer's sufferings ; no 
union with God but what we enjoy as the 
disciples and worshippers of his incarnate 
Son, But, beloved, " Christ is risen from the 
" dead, and become the first fruits of them 
" that slept." His resurrection was the 
accomplishment both of the antient pro- 
phecies and of his own prediction ; a de- 
claration on the part of God, that the great 
atonement was accepted; an attestation 
to the truth of our Saviour's doctrine and 
of his high pretensions ; a confirmation of 



125 



the hopes of his followers, which renders 
it no less unreasonable, as the case stands, 
to doubt of the ultimate completion of 
his largest promises, than it would have 
been to hope, had his promises been ac- 
tually found to fail in so principal an in- 
stance. We have reason therefore to be 
thankful, that, in the first preaching of the 
Gospe), Providence ordained that a fact of 
such importance should be accompanied 
with irresistible evidence. Nor can we 
better employ the present season, which 
the Church devotes to the commemoration 
of this great event, than in considering how 
complete the evidence of the fact is, not- 
withstanding the cavils that may be raised 
against it. For this reason I have chosen 
for my text a passage of holy writ, in 
which, as it stands at least in our English 
Bibles, the evidence is set forth to the least 
advantage. 



126 



The proof of the fact arises, we are toldy 
from the testimony of those, who, from the 
time of our Lord's first entrance on his 
ministry, had been his constant attendants. 
Their report was, that the sepulchre in 
which his body had been laid, was found 
empty on the third morning from the day 
of his crucifixion, notwithstanding the 
precaution which the Jews had taken to 
set sentinels to prevent a fraudulent re- 
moval of the body by his disciples ; — that 
his resurrection was declared by angels to 
certain of his female attendants, who, for 
the purpose of embalming his body, made 
an early visit to the sepulchre ; — that he 
appeared to these women on their return 
to the city, and that same evening came 
unexpectedly upon the eleven apostles 
as they sat at meat ; — that for forty days 
after this he appeared from time to time 
to the apostles, sometimes partaking of 



127 



their meals, discoursing with them upon 
the propagation of the Gospel, and showing 
himself alive by many infallible proofs. 

The credibility of evidence in all cases 
arises from the number, the information, 
and the veracity of the witnesses. The 
number of the witnesses in the present 
case, if we reckon only the eleven apostles^ 
(and many more might be reckoned), was 
far greater than has ever been deemed suf- 
ficient to establish a fact in a court of 
justice in the most intricate and weighty 
causes. Their information upon the general 
point in question, "that our Lord was 
" seen alive after his crucifixion," was the 
most complete that can be imagined : — 
They could not be mistaken in his person, 
who had so long and so constantly attend- 
ed him. The veracity of a witness is to be 
measured, not simply by the probity of his 
disposition and his habits of sincerity, but 



128 



by the motives which circumstances may 
present to him to adhere to the truth, or 
to deviate from it. No man loves false- 
hood for its own sake : no man therefore 
deliberately propagates a lie, but for the 
sake of some advantage to himself ; and the 
advantage which a man pursues by false- 
hood, must always be something in the 
present world — his ease and security, or 
the advancement of his fortune. For no 
one who looks forward to a future state? 
thinks that his interest there may be served 
by falsehood. It always, therefore, heigh- 
tens the credit of a witness, if he is materi^- 
ally a sufferer by the testimony which he 
gives, when he could not suffer, either in 
fortune, ease, or reputation, by a contrary 
testimony. The apostles asserted our Lord's 
resurrection to their own loss, and at the 
hazard of their lives. To have denied his 
resurrection, at least to have disproved it, 

17 



129 



which the apostles might easily have done 
had the thing been a fiction ; to have ren^ 
dered it in any high degree questionable, 
which any of the apostles might have done, 
had not the guilt of falsehood and prevari- 
cation seemed to them a greater evil than 
any sufferings which the powers of this 
world could inflict, had been the certain 
road to wealth and honours. 

To the charms of wealth and honours the 
apostles were not insensible. It was evi- 
dently the hopes of becoming the first 
ministers of the first Monarch upon earth, 
which at first attached the sons of Zebedee 
to their Master's service. The twelve were 
thrown into a consternation, by our Lord's 
reflection on the inconsistency of the love 
of riches and the pursuit of heaven ; con- 
scious, no doubt, that they were not 
exempt from the desire of riches, although 
not born to the expectation of them ; and 

K 



130 



Simon Peter discovered a great anxiety to 
know what valuable acquisitions he was 
to make in our Lord's service, in consider- 
ation of the old crazy boat and tattered 
nets, (his all, he called them) which he had 
left upon the Galilean lake to follow Christ. 
Nor were the apostles regardless of suffer- 
ing and danger. Their desertion of our 
Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, showed 
them by no means unconcerned about the 
safety of their own persons. Not, there- 
fore, to insist on the probity of the apostles, 
(which appears in many circumstances of 
the evangelical history), their veraciiifj 
by the circumstances in which they were 
placed, is, I maintain, rendered unques- 
tionable. They persevered in an assever- 
ation which exposed them to the highest in- 
dignities, and to the cruellest persecution ; 
to the loss of fame, of property, of liberty, 
and life, when a denial or recantation^ 

9 



131 



might have secured to them the most libe- 
ral rewards, and the most honourable dis- 
tinctions which the favour of princes and 
statesmen could bestow. In every circum- 
stance, therefore, for the numbers^ the in- 
fomiation^ and the veracity of the witnesses, 
no testimony could surpass in its degree 
of credibility that which was borne by the 
apostles to the fact of our Lord's resurrec- 
tion. 

It is a very singular circumstance in 
this testimony, that it is such as no length 
of time can diminish. It is founded upon 
the universal principles of human nature, 
upon maxims which are the same in all 
ages, and operate with equal strength in 
all mankind, under all the varieties of tem- 
per and habit of constitution. So long as 
it shall be contrary to the first principles 
of the human mind to delight in falsehood 
for its own sake; so long as it shall be 

K 2 



132 



true that no man willingly propagates a 
lie to his own detriment and to no purpose ; 
so long it will be certain that the apostles 
were serious and sincere in the assertion 
of our Lord's resurrection. So long as it 
shall be absurd to suppose, that twelve men 
could all be deceived in the person of a 
friend with whom they had all lived three 
years, so long it will be certain that the 
apostles were competent to judge of the 
truth and reality of the fact which they 
asserted. So long as it shall be in the na- 
ture of man, for his own interest and ease, 
to be dearer than that of another to him- 
self, so long it will be an absurdity to sup- 
pose, that twelve men should persevere for 
years in the joint attestation of a lie, to the 
great detriment of every individual of the 
conspiracy, and without any joint or sepa- 
rate advantage, when any of them had it 
in his power, by a discovery of the fraud. 



133 



to advance his ozm fame and fortune hj 
the sacrifice of nothing more dear to him^ 
than the reputation of the rest ; and so 
long will it be incredible that the story of 
our Lord's resurrection was a fiction which 
the twelve men (to mention no greater 
number), with unparalleled fortitude, and 
with equal folly, conspired to support. 
So long, therefore, as the evangelical history 
shall be preserved entire; that is, so long 
as the historical books of the New Testa- 
ment shall be extant in the world, so long 
the credibility of the apostles' testimony 
will remain whole and unimpaired. As 
this circumstance, to have in itself the 
principle of permanency, never happened 
to human testimony in any other instance, 
this preservation of the form and integrity 
of the apostolic evidence, amidst all the 
storms and wrecks which human science, 
like all things human, hath in the course 

K 3 



134 



of ages undergone, is, like the preservation 
of the Jewish nation, something of a stand- 
ing miracle. It shows, in the original pro- 
pagation of the Gospel, that contrivance 
and forecast in the plan, that power in the 
execution, which are far beyond the natural 
abilities of the human mind, and declares 
that the whole work and counsel was of 
God. 

It may seem, perhaps, that the veracity 
of the apostles, in the report of our Lord's 
resurrection, is too hastily concluded, from 
the hardships which they incurred by their 
constancy in the asseveration. Wealth 
and power are not the only objects to 
which men will sacrifice their ease, their 
fortunes, and their lives. That personal 
consequence which is acquired by bold 
and arduous undertakings, and the fame 
which follows them in after-ages, are 
sought by some as the highest good ; and 



135 



as this ambition is incident to the most 
generous and the most active minds, it is 
in this pursuit that we see men the most 
ready to encounter danger and renounce 
enjoyment. The honour of being long re- 
membered as the founders of a sect, might, 
with men of a certain turn of mind, be a 
motive to endure all the hardships whick 
the apostles underwent. It must be con- 
fessed, that men will sacrifice much to 
rescue their memories from oblivion, and 
that the fame of being the first teachers of 
a new philosophy or a new religion, will, 
by its singularity, be preferred to any other 
by minds of a particular complexion. — 
But, of all men that ever lived, the apostles 
were perhaps the least likely to be touched 
with this ambition. Their birth was mean,, 
their occupation laborious, their highest 
attainments were probably no more than to 
be able to repeat the ten commandments, 

K 4 



136 



and to have learned by rote some of the 
first principles of the Jewish faith. Such 
men were likely to be strangers to the pride 
of learning, and the ambition of invention 
and discovery. At least, that twelve men 
of their condition should be found in any 
one country, at any one time, inflamed with 
this passion in the degree in which they 
must all have been, if it was the principle 
which produced their unanimity and firm- 
ness in the propagation of a fiction at all 
hazards ; that but one of the twelve should 
prove false to so strange a combination ; 
that he in a fit of despair and remorse, the 
effect of his treachery, should hang himself, 
and dying by his own hand, not die without 
evident signs of God's anger pursuing him 
in his last moments; — all this seems a much 
greater improbability than the extraordi- 
nary fact which is supported by their tes- 
timony. It might seem less extravagant 



137 



to suppose, that the sanguine hopes which 
they had conceived, of the advancement of 
their own fortunes in the kingdom of that 
temporal Messiah which they had expected 
in our Lord, together with his promise 
of rising on the third day after the death 
which he foretold he was to suffer, (to 
which promise, however, as well as to the 
prediction of his death, the fact seems to 
be they had given little attention) : It might:, 
I say, be less extravagant to suppose, that 
this repeated promise of our Lord's, toge- 
ther with their own hopes of advancement 
in his temporal kingdom, might make them 
after his death an easy prey to the art of 
some new impostor, who might take ad- 
vantage of some general resemblance in 
himself to the person and features of the 
blessed Jesus, to personate their crucified 
Master. This might seem a supposition 
less extravagant than the former, tJiat the 



138 



apostles were supported in the asseveration 
of a falsehood by an ambition seldom inci^ 
dent to men of low birth and mean attain- 
ments. But the fact is, that the evangelical 
history equally excludes the one and the 
other supposition. If there was any thing , 
of fraud and delusion in the story of our 
Lord's resurrection, it is very evident the 
apostles must have had a principal share 
in the contrivance ; if his resurrection was 
a fiction, the body was conveyed away in 
the night. 

The report of his resurrection was spread 
early in the next morning by some of his 
female disciples ; their tale was presently 
confirmed, not indeed in the whole, but in 
some collateral and secondarv circum- 
stances, by the testimonies of St. Peter and 
St. John. Some few hours after, Peter 
vouches that he had seen our Saviour. In 
the afternoon two of the disciples bring 



139 



the news to the apostles, that they had met 
with him in their way to a village in the 
neighbourhood of Jerusalem ; and they 
relate, that they had no sooner recognized 
his person than he suddenly disappeared. 
Their tale was hardly finished when Jesus 
in person salutes the company. From this 
time ten of the eleven apostles are loud in 
the assertion of his recovery from the 
grave ; and, a week after, the eleventh is 
cured of his affected incredulity, and joins 
in the report of his associates. The apostles, 
either separately or in company, converse 
with him repeatedly. He tells them that all 
power is given him in heaven and in earth ; 
he formally invests them with a commission 
to preach the Gospel to the whole world, 
and to form a universal church, open to 
all nations ; at last, he leads them out to 
Bethany, and there, in the act of bestow- 
ing on them a solemn benediction, he was 



140 



raised from the earth and carried to iieaven 
in their sight. Of the four writers who 
have transmitted this story, two, Matthew 
and John, were apostles. The other two, 
Mark and Luke, by the consent of all an- 
tiquity, wrote under the inspection of 
apostles, — Mark under the direction of St. 
Peter, Luke of St. Paul. The credit, there- 
fore, of the apostles is pledged for the par- 
ticulars of the narrative ; and whether we 
consider the story in itself, or the writers 
of the story, it is evident, that if it was at 
all a fiction the apostles had a principal 
share in the fabrication of it. But since 
the apostles had no motive to fabricate the 
lie, or to persevere in the propagation of 
it, since the force of temptation drew the 
other way, that is, to induce them to deny 
the fact, or desist at least from the avowal 
of it ; that is, since their veracity in this 
particular instance at least is unquestion- 



141 



able, it follows, that if their report was a 
fiction, it was not of their invention ; and 
yet it has been shown, that in the invention 
they must have had a princi:pal part. A 
fiction not coined by them, and of which 
they were still the coiners, is surely the 
fiction of a fiction, the dream of a distem- 
pered brain. So that if any human testi- 
mony ever attained the certainty of demon- 
stration, it is in this instance of our Lord's 
resurrection ; which is established with far 
greater certainty by the evidence of the 
apostles, than any other fact in the whole 
compass of history, sacred or profane. 
Thus complete and perfect is the testimony 
of the twelve apostles to the matter in 
question. But a greater testimony is yet 
behind. 

Let it be supposed that the apostles, to 
avoid the infamy of having been them- 
selves deceived, might conspire to propa- 



142 



gate the delusion, and either fabricated the 
story of our Lord's resurrection with all 
its circumstances, or entered into the views 
of some new deceiver who had the resolu- 
tion to personate Jesus after his crucifixion. 
Whence then was it that this deceit obtain- 
ed the testimony of the Holy Spirit ? The 
cgncurrent testimony of the apostles them- 
selves and the Holy Spirit, form the evi- 
dence of our Lord's resurrection. " He 
" shall testify of me," said our Lord before 
he suffered, " and ye also shall bear wit- 
" ness." That notable miracles were done 
by the apostles in the name of the Lord 
Jesus, was so manifest to all them that 
dwelt in Jerusalem, that the bitterest ene- 
mies of their doctrine could not deny it ; 
nor was it ever denied by the infidels of 
antiquity. On the contrary, their attempt 
to account for it by the power of magic, is 
a confession of the fact; and while the 



143 



fact is confessed, the conclusion from the 
fact is obvious and inevitable. To refer 
the miracles, which were wrought in con- 
firmation of a doctrine which went to the 
extirpation of every corruption in morals 
and in worship, and to the establishment 
of a practical religion of good works spring- 
ing from an active faith, to the spirit of 
delusion, is a subterfuge for infidelity which 
that spirit only could suggest. 

I have now, briefly indeed, and in a sum- 
mary way, but more particularly than I 
thought to do, laid before you the irrefra- 
gable and permanent nature of the testi- 
mony by which the fact of our Lord's re- 
surrection is supported. It is my inten- ' 
tion to discuss a certain objection to this 
evidence, as the evidence is stated in my 
text, which must be allowed to be very 
plausible in the first appearance of it. I 
mean to show, that it is the necessary con- 



144 



sequence of certain circumstances, which 
indispensably require that the evidence of 
the resurrection should be just what it is ; 
insomuch that the proof would be rather 
weakened than improved by any attempt to 
complete it in the part in which it is sup- 
posed to be deficient. But this I shall re- 
serve for future discourses. Meanwhile 
you will remember, that the entire evidence 
of our Lord's resurrection consists of two 
parts ; the testimony of the apostles, and 
the testimony of the Spirit. The testi- 
mony of the apostles is the most complete 
that human testimony ever was ; the testi- 
mony of the Spirit is unexceptionable. 
The fact, therefore, is established. So cer- 
tain as it is that Christ died, so certain it 
is that he is risen. He died for our sins, 
he is risen for our justification. And re- 
member, that the only purpose for which 
Christ died and rose again was, that we, 



145 



enlightened by his doctrine, edified by his 
example, encouraged with the certain hope 
of mercy, animated by the prospect of 
eternal glory, " may rise from the death 
" of sin unto the life of righteousness." 



I* 



SERMON II. 



Acts, x. 40,41. 

" Hi7n God raised up the tlikd day^ and 
" showed him openly ; not to all the 
people, but unto witnesses chosen before 
" of Godr 

The return of the season devoted by the 
church to the solemn commemoration of 
our Lord's glorious resurrection seemed to 
admonish us, that we should direct our 
attention to the evidence by which the 
merciful providence of God was pleased 
to confirm so extraordinary a fact. The 



147 



entire evidence consists of two branches : 
It is in part human, and in part divine. 
The attestation of the apostles to the fact 
makes the human part of the evidence; 
the testimony of the Spirit in the miracu- 
lous powers exercised by the apostles was 
divine. The human part is what is chiefly 
to be examined ; for the credibihty of that 
being once established, the force of the tes- 
timony of the Spirit is obvious and irre- 
sistible: For, provided the fact be once 
established, that such miracles were per- 
formed by the apostles, these miracles were 
manifestly the " witness of God^^ which he 
bore to his own Son. The historical evi- 
dence of the fact lies in the testimony of 
the apostles themselves, and in the con- 
cession of their adversaries. The human 
testimony^ therefore, the testimony of the 
apostles, is to us, who were not eye-wit- 
nesses of the miracles which they per- 

L 2 



148 



formed, the ground-work of the whole 
evidence. 

In my last discourse I explained to you, 
in a summary way, that the credibility of 
this testimony arises from the number ^ the 
information, and the veracity of the wit- 
nesses. Their number, more than is re- 
quired by any law to establish a fact in a 
court of justice ; their information infalli- 
ble, if an infallible knowledge of their 
Master's person was the result of an at- 
tendance upon him for three years ; their 
veracity, by the circumstances in which 
they were placed, is rendered unquestion- 
able : So that, in this singular instance, if 
in any, the evidence of testimony emulates 
the certainty of mathematical demonstra- 
tion. I showed you, that the testimony 
of the apostles to the fact of our Lord's 
resurrection is not more extraordinary in 
the degree than in the permanency of the 

9 



149 



credibility which belongs to it. It is not 
only so constituted that it must have been 
satisfactory and irrefragable at the time 
when it was delivered, but so immutable 
are the principles on which the credit of it 
stands, that by no length of time can it 
suffer diminution. What it was to the con- 
temporaries of the apostles, the same it is 
to us now in the end of the eighteenth 
century; and so long as the historical 
books of the New Testament shall be ex- 
tant in the world, (and to suppose that a: 
time shall come when they shall be no 
longer extant, were, I think, to mistrust 
our Master's gracious promise) ; so long 
as these books then shall be extant, so long 
the testimony of the apostles shall preserve 
its original credibility. 

Another circumstance must be mention- 
ed, not less extraordinary than the perma- 
nent nature of the testimony, which may 

L 3 



150 



be called the popularity of the evidence. 
It is not always the case that a proof built 
on true principles, and sound in every part, 
which, when it is narrowly examined, must 
of consequence be satisfactory to men of 
knowledge and discernment, is of a sort to 
be easily and generally understood. For 
the most part, perhaps, the proof of fact is 
a thing more remote from popular appre- 
hension than scientific demonstration: For 
the connection of an argument is what 
every one naturally and necessarily per- 
ceives; but between a fact and the testi- 
mony of the witnesses who affirm it, there 
is indeed no physical and necessary con- 
nection. A witness may speak rashly, 
without a sufficient knowledge of the fact 
which he pretends to assert, or he may 
speak falsely, contrary to his knowledge. 
Thus the folly and the vices of men have 
rendered it for the most part very difficult 



151 



to perceive, how the certainty of a fact 
arises from the attestations given to it ; and 
to appreciate the credibility of historical 
evidence is become a task for the highest 
and most improved abilities ; requiring a 
certain dexteritv and acuteness of the mind 
in detecting great fallacies, and in reconcil- 
ing seeming inconsistencies, which is sel- 
dom to be acquired in any considerable 
degree but by a practical familiarity with 
the habits of the world, joined to an accu- 
rate and philosophical study of mankind. 
And, accordingly, we see, that men of the 
slowest apprehension, if they have had but 
a sufficient degree of experience to make 
them jealous of being imposed upon, are 
always the most averse to believe extra- 
ordinary narrations. But, in the case 
before us, no extraordinary penetration is 
requisite to perceive the infallibility of the 
evidence. Every man has experienced the 

L 4 



152 



certainty with which he distinguishes the 
person and the features of a friend* Every 
one knows how dearly he loves himself; 
with what reluctance he would sacrifice 
his ease and expose his person in any pro- 
ject, from which he expected no return 
of profit or enjoyment. And with this ex- 
perience and these feelings, every one is 
qualified to sit in judgment upon the fact 
of our Lord's resurrection, and to decide 
upon the evidence. And in this circum- 
stance, no less than in the permanent 
nature of the evidence, we may see, and 
we have reason to adore, the hand of Pro- 
vidence. For to what can we ascribe it 
but to the over-ruling providence of God, 
that while the proof of historic facts is, for 
the most part, of the most intricate and 
embarrassed nature, the most extraordinary 
event which history records should be ac- 
companied with a proof as universally per- 



153 



spicuoiis as the fact itself is interesting ? 
Every man born into the world is interested 
in the event which has opened to us all 
the gate of Heaven. And the evidence 
which accompanies the fact is such, that 
every man born into the world is in a ca- 
pacity to derive conviction from it. 

Notwithstanding, however, the solidity 
and the general perspicuity of the proof, 
considered in itself, it may seem to lie open 
to a considerable objection. Many objec- 
tions have indeed been brought against it. 
Some have been taken from the varieties 
with which the four Evangelists relate the 
first declaration of the event by the angels 
to the Galilean women at the sepulchre. 
These I consider as cavils rather than ob- 
jections. Every attentive reader of the 
. Gospel knows that the female followers of 
our Lord were numerous. He will easily 
discover that these numerous female fol- 



154 



lowers had made an appointment to meet 
at the sepulchre at an early hour of the 
first day of the week, for the purpose of 
embalming the body ; a business which the 
intervention of the Sabbath had obliged 
them to postpone. He will easily imagine 
that these women would be lodged in dif- 
ferent parts of the city, and of consequence 
would come to the sepulchre in several 
parties and by different paths ; that they 
arrived all early, but not exactly at the 
same time. He will perceive, that the 
detachments of the heavenly squadron, the 
angels who attended on this great occasion, 
to whom the business was committed of 
frightening the Roman sentinels from their 
station, of opening the sepulchre for the ad- 
mission of the women, and of announcing 
the resurrection, became visible and invisi- 
ble at pleasure, and appeared to the women 
of the different parties, as they successively 



155 



arrived, in different forms, and accosted 
them in different words; and in this way the 
first evidences of the fact were multipHedj 
which had been single, had the women all 
arrived in a body at the same instant, and 
seen all the same vision.* Each evange- 
list, it may be supposed, has confined himr 
self to that part of the story which he had 
at the first hand from the women who had 



* The company which saw what is related by St. Matthew 
(of which company Mary Magdalene, although mentioned by 
the Evangehst, was not, I think, included), went by a path 
which led to the front of the sepulchre, and came within sight 
of it early enough to be witnesses to the descent of the angel, 
the flight of the guard, and the removal of the stone. While 
these things passed, Mary Magdalene with her party were 
coming by another path which led round the back part of 
the sepulchre, and came not within sight of the entrance of 
the sepulchre till the first party had left it. They, therefore, 
no sooner came within sight than they saw that the stone was 
removed, and Mary Magdalene immediately ran back to 
inform Peter and John of her suspicions. The rest of the 
women of that party proceeded to the sepulchre, entered it, 



156 



first fallen in his way, and each woman re- 
lated what she herself had seen and heard, 
which was different from what had been 
seen and heard by the women of another 
company. These few simple observations, 
as they reconcile the narratives of the seve- 
ral evangelists with each other, and the 
particulars of each narrative with the gene- 
ral fact in which they all consent, dissipate 



and were assured of our Lord's resurrection by the angel, 
whom they found within the tomb in the manner related by 
St. Mark. Presently after these women had left the sepulchre, 
Peter and John arrived, followed by Mary Magdalene ; for 
she hastened back to the sepulchre when she apprised the 
apostles of her fears. After Mary Magdalene, waiting at the 
sepulchre, had seen our Lord, and was gone away to carry 
his message to the apostles, Luke's women arrive, and are 
informed by two angels within the tomb. In the interval be- 
tween our Lord's appearance at the sepulchre to Mary Mag- 
dalene, and the arrival of Luke's party, he appeared to St. 
Matthew's party, who were yet upon the way back to the 
.city. For that the appearance to Mary Magdalene was the 
first, St. Mark testifies. 



157 



any objections that may be raised from the 
varieties of their story. The objection 
which I purpose to consider, in the first 
face of it, is far more specious. It seems 
to arise spontaneously from the state of the 
evidence which is given in the text ; and 
thus throwing itself in the way of every one 
. who reads the Bible, or who hears it read, 
it seems to be a stumbling-block in the 
way of the believer, which it is our duty, if 
God shall give us the ability, to remove. 
" Him hath God raised up, and showed 
" him openly ; not to all the people, but to 
" witnesses chosen before of God." 

The selection of witnesses carries, it may 
. be said, no very fair appearance. Jesus 
was seen alive after his crucifixion, but he 
was seen, it should appear, by those only 
who had been his early associates, who had 
been employed by him to travel over the 
country as his heralds, proclaiming him as 



158 



the long-expected Messiah, who, by the event 
of his public and ignominious end, were in- 
volved in general contempt and ridicule. 
Why was he not shown to all the people, 
if the identity of his person would stand 
the test of a public exhibition? Was it 
not more likely, that the Jewish people 
would be sooner convinced by his own 
public appearance, than by the report of 
those who had long been considered as the 
first victims of his imposture, or the sworn 
accomplices of his fraud? The most in- 
credulous of his enemies had declared they 
would believe in him, if they might but see 
him descend from the cross. Would they 
not much more have believed, had they . 
seen him on the third day arisen from the 
grave ? Were the Jewish people kindly 
treated when they were punished for their 
infidelity, of which they might have been 
cured, had the evidence been afforded 



159 



them, which in so extraordinary a case 
they might reasonably demand? In such 
a case, the choice of witnesses brings a 
suspicion on their whole testimony ; a sur- 
mise that they were chosen, not of God, 
but of themselves and their confederates. 
Perhaps they preferred persecution, with 
the fame attending it, to security accom- 
panied with contempt ; and they pretended 
a selection of themselves to be witnesses 
on the part of heaven, to give the better 
colour to the lie, which they were deter- 
mined, at all hazards, to maintain. 

This imperfection, as it may seem, in the 
proof of our Lord's resurrection, was not 
overlooked by the infidels of antiquity. 
It was urged in one of the first written at- 
tacks upon Christianity; and Origen, whose 
elaborate confutation of that able adver- 
sary is still extant, allows that the objec- 
tion is not contemptible. The fact which 



160 



creates the whole difficulty (that Jesus was 
not seen in public after his interment), 
seems indeed confessed in the text, and 
confirmed in general by the evangelical 
history. Nevertheless, this fact is not to 
be admitted without some limitation. We 
read in St. Paul's first epistle to the Corin- 
thians, of a certain appearance of our 
Lord to more than five hundred brethren 
at once. So large a company is not likely 
to have been assembled in a house, nor is 
it likely that they met by accident ; the as- 
sembly must have been called together for 
some express purpose, and what purpose 
so likely as to receive the satisfaction 
which was absolutely afforded them, of be- 
holding with their own eyes their crucified 
Lord restored to life ? Nor is it to be sup- 
posed, that an object of the human size 
and form could be seen distinctly by five 
hundred persons all at once, but by day- 



161 



light. Here then is one appearance of our 
Lord, in which no circumstance of privacy 
could be pretended. It was by day -light ; 
in the open air. Notice had been given 
of the time and place of the appearance. 
The notice which drew together so nume- 
rous an assembly, at a distance from the 
capital, or any populous town, must have 
been very public ; and from a sight to 
which five hundred brethren were admit- 
ted, it is not easy to conceive that any who 
were not brethren, if they were pleased to 
repair to the appointed place at the ap- 
pointed time, could be excluded. Indeed, 
if this appearance of the five hundred, re- 
corded by St. Paul, was the same with that 
on the Galilean hill, recorded by St. Mat- 
thew, which is the opinion of the most 
learned critics and divines, and is highly 
probable, because the appearance on the 
Galilean hill was an appearance at a set 

M 



162 



time and place, as that to the five hundred 
must have been ; — -if these, I say, were 
one and the same appearance, it is certain 
that our Lord was seen upon this occasion 
by some who were not brethren. For 
St. Matthew relates, that when Christ was 
seen and worshiped on the Galilean hill, 
" some doubted/^ Not some of the eleven 
who are mentioned in the preceding verse, 
for the eleven doubted not. Thomas 
was the last of the eleven to believe, 
yet Thomas ceased to doubt upon our 
Lord's second appearance in the evening 
assembly, on the Sunday se'nnight after 
his resurrection. Nor is it likely that 
doubters should be included by St. Paul 
in the number of those whom he dignified 
with the appellation of brethren. This ap- 
pearance, therefore, in Galilee was public, 
not to the disciples only, but to a promis- 
cuous multitude of disciples and of doubtful 



163 



unbelieving Jews. The assertion, therefore, 
of my text, that Christ, raised from the 
dead, was not shown openly to all the 
people, is to be understood with some limit- 
ation. Once he certainly was shown openly, 
perhaps not oftener than once ; and if once 
or twice more, still his appearance was not 
public compared with the unreserved man- 
ner of his conversation with the world 
during his triennial ministry. He resorted 
not daily to the temple; he preached to 
no multitudes in the fields ; he performed 
no public miracles ; he held no public dis- 
putations ; he was present at no wed- 
dings ; he ate not with publicans and sin- 
ners. They were only his chosen witnesses 
to whom ocular proof was repeatedly given 
that he was indeed alive again. In a gene- 
ral way of speaking, it is to be confessed 
that he was not shown openly to all the 
people. But what if the assertion were 
M 2 



164 



true in the utmost sense in which the ad- 
versary would wish it to be accepted ? 
What if it were granted, that the pretend- 
ed appearances after the interment were 
not pubHc in any single instance ? It will 
follow that our Lord, if he was really alive 
again, was not seen by many : What of 
that ? Is it a necessary consequence that 
he was not seen by some? Is the no 
evidence of the many who saw him not, and 
have therefore nothing positive to say 
upon the question, to overpower the ex- 
plicit assertions of those who depose to the 
fact of repeated appearances ? It will 
hardly be pretended that the bare fact, that 
he was not seen by the many, amounts in 
itself to a proof that the story of his resur- 
rection was a fiction. 

But it is supposed, I apprehend, that 
had the resurrection been real, public ap- 
pearances would have heightened the proof 



165 



of it ; and that, on the other hand, if the 
thing was a fiction, the concealment of the 
person who was made to pass for Jesus 
among the credulous disciples, was a means 
of preventing a detection of the fraud. And 
it is thought unreasonable to suppose, that 
the belief of so extraordinary a thing should 
be required of the world on the part of 
Heaven, without the highest proof that could 
be given, or without a fair submission of 
the evidence to the strictest scrutiny. The 
objection, therefore, is this, that the proof 
which is produced of the fact is less than 
might have been procured had the thing 
averred been a reality, and that, such as it 
is, it was not submitted at the time to the 
examination of the public. In my next 
discourse I shall endeavour to show you, 
that the objection is of a sort to deserve 
less attention than you may at first ima- 
gine, even if what it presumes were true, 

M 3 



166 



that the frequency of public appearances 
would have been a means of heightening 
the evidence of fact on the one hand, or 
of detecting an imposition on the other. 
Secondly^ I shall show you that both these 
presumptions are indeed erroneous : That 
an open conversation with the world would 
neither have added to the proof of a real 
resurrection, nor contributed to the detec- 
tion of a counterfeit. And after all, I shall 
show you, that frequent public exhibitions 
of the person after the resurrection, if they 
could have heightened the proof of the fact, 
had been on other accounts improper. In- 
somuch, that what the story might have 
gained in credit by an addition of testi- 
mony, it would have lost in another way, 
by an impropriety and inconsistency which 
might have been charged upon the conduct 
of our Lord. 



167 



Meanwhile, if it should occur to you to 
wonder that Jesus, after his resurrection, 
should not be shown openly, but to chosen 
witnesses, remember, that by the funda- 
mental maxims of the doctrine which Jesus 
preached, it is the privilege of the pure 
in heart^'' and of them only, to see God. 
In some sense, indeed, God is seen by all 
mankind, and by the whole rational crea- 
tion. God is seen by all men in his works, 
in the fabric and the motions of the ma- 
terial world. " The heavens declare the 
" glory of God, and the firmament showeth 
" his handy-work." The very devils see 
him in his judgments : Wise men see him 
in his providential government of human 
actions, in the rise and fall of states and 
empires : The pious believer sees him with 
the eye of faith, in the miraculous support 
and preservation of his church from the 
attacks of open enemies, the treachery of 

M 4 



168 



false friends, and the intemperate or the 
lukewarm zeal of its weaker members. He 
sees him with the intellectual eye, discern- 
ing, in part at least, his glorious perfections; 
and they, and only they, who thus see him 
now, shall at last literally see the majesty 
of the Godhead in the person of their glo- 
rified Lord. By the lost world Jesus shall 
be seen no more, except as he hath been 
seen by the unbelieving Jews, in judgment, 
when he comes to execute vengeance on 
them who know not God, and obey not 
the Gospel ; but if any man keep his say- 
ing, he shall be admitted to his presence, 
" that where his Saviour is, there he may 
« be also." 



SERMON III. 



Acts, x. 40, 41. 

" Hiin God liaised up the third day^ and 
" shoxved him openly; not to all the 
" people^ but unto witnesses chosen he- 
« fore of Godr 

In my first discourse upon this text, I en- 
deavoured to explain to you the credibility 
of the testimony which was borne by the 
apostles to the fact of our Lord's resurrec- 
tion ; its original credibility at the time 
when it was delivered ; its undiminished 
credibility in all succeeding times ; and the 
universality of the proof, not only as it 



170 



must subsist to all ages, but as it is accom- 
modated to all capacities. 

In a second discourse, I stated some of 
the principal objections which our adver- 
saries have raised, to elude the force of this 
invincible proof. I showed you the futi- 
lity of those which are taken from a pre- 
tended disagreement of the Evangelists, in 
their relation of the manner in which the 
discovery was made to the women who 
visited the sepulchre on the Sunday morn- 
ing. I showed you, that the whole force 
of these objections rests on a very impro- 
bable supposition, which har not the least 
countenance in the circumstances of the 
story, that the numerous female followers 
of our Lord went all in one body to the 
sepulchre; that they all arrived, at least, in 
the same instant of time, and all saw the 
same vision. Admit only that the women 
went in diiferent parties, that they arrived 

9 



I 



171 

some a little earlier, some a little later, and 
that the attending angels showed them- 
selves to the different companies in differ- 
ent forms, and accosted them in different 
words, and you will find no disagreement 
of the four Evangelists, no differences in 
their relation, which should affect the credit 
of their testimony to the general fact. 
Their several narrations harmonize as dif- 
ferent parts of one story, each relating the 
particular part which he could best attest. 

I engaged in a more particular discus- 
sion of an objection, in the first face of it 
far more specious, founded on the acknow- 
ledged concealment of the person of Jesus 
after his resurrection. Forty days elapsed 
before he took leave of this sublunary 
world, by an ascension to heaven in the 
sight of his apostles. In the interval he 
was seen repeatedly by them and by other 
disciples ; but it seems to be acknowledged 



172 



in the text, that he was not &hown openly 
to all the people. 

I showed you, that the assertion that he 
was not publicly seen, is to be understood 
with certain limitations. That once, at 
least, our Lord was shown openly to as 
many as thought proper to repair to an 
appointed place. The circumstances of 
this appearance will not admit of the sup- 
position that any were excluded from the 
sight, unless the body in which he was 
seen by the five hundred was, upon this 
occasion, visible only to the brethren: — a 
supposition in itself not absurd, perhaps 
not improbable, were it not set aside by 
St. Matthew's testimony, that he was ac- 
tually seen by some at least who were not 
brethren, by some who doubted while the 
eleven worshipped. He was therefore, 
upon this occasion, visible to all without 
distinction. 



173 



. Of any other public exhibition of the 
person, no trace is to be found in the his- 
tory of the forty days. And if we might 
suppose it to have been once or twice re- 
peated, still his appearance was not public 
compared with what it had been during his 
triennial ministry. Nothing like an open 
familiar conversation with the world can 
be pretended or indeed supposed. Tt must 
be confessed, with a certain limitation, that 
he was not shown openly to all the people. 
To the rulers of the people he was never 
shown at all. His single public appearance 
was not in the metropolis or its vicinity, 
but in a remote corner of Galilee, where 
his friends and followers were the most 
numerous, and his enemies in the least 
credit ; insomuch that, even in this in- 
stance, there was something of a selection 
of spectators ; and the candid believer, by 
the, evidence of the Gospel history itself, is 



174 



reduced to a concession, (a concession, 
however, in which he will find cause to 
glory,) that whatever reality there may be 
in the story of his resurrection, Jesus ever 
after it shunned the public eye. 

It is imagined by the adversary, that had 
the resurrection been real, public appear- 
ances would have heightened the proof of 
it; and that, on the other hand, if the thing 
was a fiction, concealment of the person 
was a means of preventing a ready detec- 
tion of the fraud. And he thinks it unrea- 
sonable to suppose, that the belief of a 
thing so extraordinary should be required 
of the world on the part of Heaven, without 
the highest proof that could be given, or 
without a fair submission of the evidence, 
such as it might be, to the severest scru- 
tiny. The sum of the objection, then, is 
this, that the proof which is produced of 
the fact is less than might have been given 



175 



had the thing averred been a reality, and 
that, such as it is, it was not fairly sub- 
mitted at the time to the examination of 
the public. 

I come now to show you, as I engaged 
to do, Jirstf that the objection is really 
of a sort to deserve little attention, even if 
what it presumes were true, that the fre- 
quency of public appearances would have 
heightened proof on the one hand, or faci- 
litated the detection of fraud on the other. 

Secondly, That the objection is errone- 
ous in both these suppositions. 

And when I shall have thus overturned 
the objection, I shall show you, that with- 
o\it any regard to what the proof of the 
fact might have gained by the frequency 
of public appearances, or what it might 
lose by the want of them, other consider- 
ations rendered it improper and indecent, 
that our Lord, arisen from the grave, should 



176 



renew his open conversation with the 
world in general. So that, be the force of 
the objection what it may, if there be any 
truth in our Saviour's high pretensions, 
any thing of reality in the evangelical 
scheme of redemption, his resurrection, be 
it ever so much a fact, must, in the nature 
of the thing, be obnoxious to this objection. 
That Christ should rise from the dead, and 
that risen he should converse openly and 
familiarly with the world in the manner in 
, which he did before his passion, these two 
things are incompatible ; so that if both 
appeared as facts upon the sacred records, 
the proof which it is supposed might have 
accrued to the resurrection from the fre- 
quency of public appearances, would have 
been overpowered by the general incohe- 
rence of the story. 

First, I say, the objection, were the as- 
sumptions true on which it rests, would be 



177 



of little weight. The reality of a fact is 
always to be measured by the positive 
proof on one side or the other, which is 
really extant in the world. If no proof is 
found but what is in itself imperfect, as 
when the witnesses seem too few, or their 
reports contradictory, the fact is question- 
able. But if any proof exists in itself un- 
exceptionable, the thing is not to be ques- 
tioned for the mere want of other proofs, 
which men living at a distance from the 
time and the scene of the business, may 
imagine it might have had. Men are very 
apt to lose sight of this principle. They 
are apt to amuse themselves with a display 
of their sagacity (for such they think it) 
in alleging the proof that might have been, 
when their penetration would be better 
shown in a fair examination of what is ac- 
tually extant. They are not aware, that in 
thus opposing proof which is not, to that 

N 



178 



which is, they are really weighing a 
shadow against a substance ; and that the 
highest argument of a weak mind (an im- 
putation which they most dread) is not to 
feel the force of present evidence. Thus 
it is, that " professing themselves wise they 
" become fools." This is an answer which 
will apply on every occasion, when men 
resist the conviction of a proof, in which 
they can discover no fallacy or imperfec-* 
tion, upon a pretence that some collateral 
proof of the same fact, which would have 
been more satisfactory, is wanting. An 
objection of this sort is always frivolous, 
even when it is true that the required proof, 
had it been extant, would have been more 
satisfactory than any that is found, pro- 
vided what is found be in itself a just proof, 
true in its principles, coherent in its parts, 
and fair in its conclusions. 



179 



But, secondly, I affirm, that in the par- 
ticular case before us, the required proof 
which is supposed to be wanting, had it 
been given, would have been no addition 
to the evidence of the thing in question. 
If our Lord really rose from the grave, as 
we believe he did, the evidence of the fact 
would not have been heightened by repeat^ 
ed public appearances to the Jewish peo- 
ple. It is evident, that to have seen him 
ever so often after his resurrection, would 
have qualified no one to be a witness of 
the fact, who had not such a previous 
knowledge of his person, as might enable 
him to perceive and attest its identity. 
Perhaps we may insist upon another cir- 
cumstance, that every one pretending to 
avouch the resurrection, should have been 
an eye-witness of the crucifixion. For the 
fact to be attested is, that this same man 
" was dead and is iilive again," But in 

N 2 



180 



the innumerable multitude that was assem- 
bled to behold the tragic scene on Calvary, 
how many may be supposed to have had 
such a view of the Divine Sufferer, as might 
bring them acquainted with his person? 
The far greater part not only saw him at a 
distance, but, in the tumult which would 
attend the dismal spectacle, they would 
never get a steady view : They would now 
and then catch a momentary glimpse of a 
part only of his person, which they would 
lose again before any distinct impression 
pould be made. Those who saw the whole 
transaction from the most advantageous 
stations, would see the cheeks pale, the fea- 
tures convulsed, the whole body distorted 
with the torture of the punishment. Those 
who saw the very beginning of this horrid 
business, who saw Jesus before he was fas- 
tened to the cross, would see him exhaust- 
ed with the mental agony in the garden, 



181 



worn down with the fatigue of his long ex- 
amination, and with the pain of those pre- 
paratory inflictions, which, by the Roman 
law, by the terms of which he suffered, 
were the constant prelude to a capital exe- 
cution, and in this instance had not been 
spared. Nor would the spectators be suf- 
ficiently composed, agitated as they all 
would be, some with the horror of the 
scene, some with pity of his sufferings, 
some with joy for the success of their in- 
fernal machinations ; under one or another 
of these various emotions, none would be 
sufficiently composed to observe and re- 
mark the peculiarities of his person. In- 
somuch, that of those who saw him now 
for the first time, few, perhaps, had he ever 
been seen by them again, would have 
known him from either of the malefactors 
who were made the companions of his 
agonies. 

N 3 



182 



It may seem, perhaps, that at the time 
of our Saviour's crucifixion, his person must 
have been, generally well known among the 
Jews, when, for a longer time than three 
years, he had sustained the public cha- 
racter of a teacher and a prophet. He had 
been much resorted to for the fame of his 
doctrine, and for the benefit of his miracles, 
as well as for an opinion which, to the 
moment of his apprehension, prevailed 
among the common people, that he would 
prove the long-expected deliverer of the 
nation. It may be presumed, therefore, 
that many who saw him expire on the 
cross, were previously well acquainted with 
his person. But if it be considered, that 
during the whole period of his ministry 
he was constantly in motion, travelling 
from place to place ; that the multitudes 
that followed him, whenever he appeared 
in public, were for the most part numerous^ 



183 



to the amount of several thousands, it will 
seem improbable that the number of those 
could be great, who had the good fortune 
to get a distinct sight of him oftener than 
once in the whole course of his triennial 
ministry. Of consequence, it is improbable 
that many beside his constant followers 
knew him well enough to identify his per- 
son. They who had not this distinct know- 
ledge of his person, however frequent the 
public appearances had been after the 
resurrection, were not qualified to be %mt- 
nesses of the fact even to themselves. The 
conviction that the person whom they now 
saw alive, was the same person who had 
been put to death, they must haye owed 
to the attestations of those who knew him 
better than they. And the few who might 
be the best acquainted with his person, still 
w^ere not qualified to be witnesses of his re- 
surrection to the worlds unless their know- 

N 4' 



184 



ledge oj^the person was itself a fact of public 
notoriety. For, to establish the credit of a 
witness, it is not sufficient that he be really 
competent to judge for himself of the real- 
ity of the fact which he takes it upon him 
to attest, but his competency in the matter 
must be a thing generally known and un- 
derstood. Now this was the case of the 
apostles. It is a notorious fact, that they 
could not be incompetent in the knowledge 
of their Master's person presented to their 
senses. But the same thing, although it 
might have been equally true, could not 
be equally manifest of any who had pre- 
tended to join in their attestation, from a 
knowledge of his person acquired in acci- 
dental interviews, of which the reality was 
known only to themselves. Their testi- 
mony would rather have discredited the 
cause than heightened the evidence ; as in 
all cases the depositions of witnesses sus- 
9 



185 



pected of incompetency have no effect but 
to create a prejudice against the fact which 
thev assert, and to diminish the force of 
better testimony, which, left to itself, would 
have produced conviction. 

It appears, therefore, upon a nice dis- 
cussion of the question, that the evidence 
which we actually have of our Lord's re- 
surrection, in the testimony of the chosen 
witnesses^ is indeed the greatest of which 
the fact is naturally capable. No other 
could have been transmitted as original 
testimony to posterity, no other could have 
been satisfactory to the public at the time. 
The demand of frequent public exhibitions 
of the person is the demand of folly ; not 
perceiving the distinction between a just 
proof, by which a fact may be established, 
and those vague reports which every one 
adopts and no one owns, which serve only 
to multiply doubt and to propagate uncer- 



186 



talnty. Public appearances could have 
added nothing to the testimony of the cho- 
sen witnesses. By destroying the precision 
of the story, they might have diminished 
the efficacy of its proper evidence. The 
conviction to be derived from them would 
have been appropriated to the few who 
had a distinct knowledge of our Saviour's 
person, and the whole benefit of thek con- 
viction would have been confined to them- 
selves. If it should seem that such persons 
had a right to the evidence of their own 
senses, because they were qualified to re- 
ceive it, the principle perhaps might be 
doubted ; for the testimony of the apostles 
was of no less force with respect to these 
persons than to the rest of the world ; and 
I cannot see that any man in any case has 
a right to more than proof Yet it may 
be presumed, that a provision was merci- 
fully made for their particular conviction 



187 



by the appearance in Galilee. It is re- 
markable at least, that the province where 
our Saviour's person must have been the 
most generally known, was chosen for the 
scene of the single public exhibition. The 
testimony of sense was, by this choice of 
the place of appearance, made as general 
as a single appearance could make it ; and 
more perhaps was not to be done for the 
satisfaction of individuals, without hazard- 
ing the credit of the public evidence. 

For the same reasons for which frequent 
public appearances would not have height- 
ened the evidence of the fact, if the resur- 
rection was real, they would have contri- 
buted nothing to the detection of the fal- 
lacy, had it been a fiction. Those to 
whom the living person had been unknown 
were as ill qualified to deny as to affirm 
the identity ; and any whose knowledge 
of the person had been so acquired as not 



188 



to be notorious to the public, however 
they might decide upon the fact for them- 
selves, their testimony on either side was 
insignificant. At the same time, an ap- 
pearance in Galilee, the province where 
the family of the real Jesus lived, where 
the whole of his own life had been passed 
before the commencement of his ministry, 
and the greater part of it afterwards ; where 
he performed his first miracles, and deli- 
vered his first discourses ; a public ap- 
pearance in this part of the country, at a 
set time and place, was a step on which 
an impostor hardly would have risked his 
credit. 

Thus it appears, that the objection to 
the fact of our Lord's resurrection, arising 
from the concealment of his person, spe- 
cious as at first it seems, rests upon no 
solid foundation. The fact being of such 
a nature, that however unreserved the ex- 



189 



hibition of the person had been, its evi- 
dence must still have rested on the testi-=- 
mony of chosen witnesses, which, notwith- 
standing any frequency of public appear- 
ances, would still have been the single 
proof. For to the perfection of this proof 
taken by itself, the certainty of the fact 
must still have been proportional. Had 
it been imperfect, public appearances 
could not have supplied the deficiency. 
Perfect as it is, its validity is nothing 
weakened by the mere absence of insig- 
nificant attestations. 

There were, perhaps, among the enemies 
of our Lord, some who were well acquaint- 
ed with his person. Such were many of 
the Pharisees with whom he disputed, the 
chief priests before whom he was exa- 
mined, Herod and his courtiers, Pontius 
Pilate, and the great officers of his train. 



190 



It may be imagined that many, if not all of 
these, would have been conveited by re- 
peated public appearances after the resur- 
rection. Their attestations would cer- 
tainly have carried considerable weight ; 
and infidelity may dream, that it is a sus- 
picious circumstance that the method was 
not taken which might have procured so 
important an addition to the evidence, 
and to any but an impostor must have 
ensured success. The truth is, that all 
this evidence would have consisted in the 
testimony of particular persons ; and any 
testimony of particular persons which the 
frequency of public appearances might 
have procured, would still have been the 
evidence of chosen witnesses. To ask, 
therefore, why the evidence of the Pha- 
risees or the priests, of Herod or the Ro- 
man governor, was not secured, is only 



191 



to ask, why the chosen witnesses were 
not other than they are ? or why the num- 
ber was not multlpKed ? It might be suffi- 
cient to reply, that the number was more 
than sufficient, that the persons chosen, 
for their competency and veracity, were 
unexceptionable. But a special reason 
will appear, why the rulers of the Jews 
were not admitted to the honour of bear- 
ing witness to him whom they had cru- 
cified and slain, when I come to allege 
the particular considerations which, with- 
out regard to what the proof of the fact 
might have gained by the frequency of 
public appearances, or what it may have 
lost by the want of them, rendered it im- 
proper that our Lord, arisen from the 
grave, should resume his open convers- 
ation with the world. Improper in 
that degree, that in the same sense in 



192 



which we say of God that he cannot ^be 
unjust or cannot lie, it may be said of 
Christ that he could not, after his resur- 
rection, be openly conspicuous to all the 
people. 



SERMON IV. 



Acts, x. 40, 41. 

Hiin God raised up the third day, and 
showed him openly; not to all the 
" people, but unto witnesses chosen be- 
« fore of Godr 

We are still upon the propriety of a selec- 
tion of witnesses to attest the fact of our 
Lord's resurrection. In my last discourse, 
I discussed the objection which may be 
brought against the fact, from the acknow- 
ledged concealment of the person. The 
whole force of the objection rests on an 
assumption, that the frequency of pubHc 



194 



appearances, on the one hand, would have 
heightened the evidence of the fact, if it 
were real ; on the other, would have been 
a means of detecting the fallacy had it 
been a fiction. I have shown you, that 
the objection is of a sort to deserve little 
attention, were the assumption true : Be- 
cause the reality of a fact is always to be 
measured by the positive proof, on one 
side or the other, which is really extant in 
the world; which is never to be set aside 
by the mere absence of another proof, 
which men, living at a distance from the 
time and scene of the transaction, may 
imagine might have been had. For this, 
indeed, were to make the caprice of men 
the standard of historic truth. 

I showed you farther, that the assump- 
tion, on which the objection is built, is false 
in both its branches: That the frequency 
of public appearances would have been no 



195 



means of heightening evidence, or of detect- 
ing fallacy. It is essentially necessary to 
the proof of any fact by testimony, that 
the witnessses should be chosen. Witnesses 
must be chosen, who are competent to the 
knowledge of the thing which they attest, 
and whose competency is itself a fact of 
public notoriety. In the case in question, 
witnesses were to be chosen who had a 
distinct knowledge of the person of Jesus 
before his passion, and of whom it was 
publicly known that they had this previous 
knowledge of the person, I showed you, 
that this was likely to be the case of very 
few among the Jews, except our Lord's 
constant followers, and certain leading per- 
sons in the faction of his persecutors. A 
particular reason why the latter were ex- 
cluded from the honour of bearing their 
testimony to him whom they had perse- 
cuted and slain, will presently appear: 



196 



for I come now to the last part of the task 
in which I am engaged, which is to show 
you, that, without any regard to what the 
proof of the fact might have gained by the 
frequency of public appearances, or what 
it might lose by the want of them, other 
considerations rendered it improper and 
indecent that our Lord, arisen from the 
grave, should renew his open conversation 
with the unbelieving world; — improper in 
that degree, that in the same sense in which 
we say of God that he cannot be unjust, 
and cannot lie, it may be said of Christ 
that he could not, after his resurrection, 
be universally and ordinarily conspicuous 
to all the people. And this indeed is the 
only answer which Origen thought it v/orth 
while to give to the objection brought 
against the fact of the resurrection from 
the concealment of our Saviour's person. 
He is at no pains to show, what he want- 



197 



ed not acuteness to discern, or eloquence 
to persuade, that the evidence of the fact 
could not have been heightened by any 
frequency of public appearances ; but, as 
if he would allow the advantage resulting 
from them to the proof to be any thing 
the adversary might be pleased to suppose, 
he rests his reply on the sole consideration 
of an unseemliness in the thing required, 
constituting what may be called a moral 
impossibility. 

To understand this, it will be necessary 
to consider the manner of our Lord's ap- 
pearance to his disciples after his resurrec- 
tion. We shall find, even in his interviews 
with them, no trace of that easy familiarity 
of intercourse which obtained between 
them before his death, when he condescend- 
ed to lead his whole life in their society, 
as a man living with his equals. Had the 
history of his pre^'ious life been as myste- 



198 



rioiisly obscure as that of the forty days 
between the resurrection and ascension is 
in many circumstances ; had his previous 
habits been as studiously reserved, proof 
would indeed have been wanting that he 
had ever sustained the condition of a mor- 
tal man, and the error of the Docetae, who 
taught that he was a man in appearance 
only, might have been universal. But the 
truth is, that the scheme of redemption re- 
quired, that before the passion the form of 
the servant should be predominant in the 
Redeemer's appearance ; that after his re- 
surrection the form of God should be con- 
spicuous. Accordingly, throughout his 
previous life his manners were grave but 
unreserved, serious rather than severe ; his 
deportment highly dignified, but unassum- 
ing ; and the whole course and method of 
his life was unconcealed, and it appears to 
have been the life of a man in every cir- 



199 



cumstance. He had a home at Caper- 
naum, where he lived with his mother and 
her family, except when the stated festivals 
called him to Jerusalem, or the business of 
his ministry induced him to visit other 
towns. When he travelled about the coun- 
try to propagate his doctrine, and to heal 
those that were vexed of the devil, the 
evangelical history, for the most part, in- 
forms us whence he set out and whither 
he went ; and, with as much accuracy as 
can be expected in such compendious com- 
mentaries as the Gospels are, we are in- 
formed of the time of his departure from 
one place, and of his arrival at another. 
We can, for the most part, trace the road 
by which he passed ; we can mark the 
towns and villages which he touched in 
his way ; and in , many instances we are 
told, that in such a place he was entertain- 
ed at the house of such a person. Upon 

Q 4 



200 



these joiirnies he was attended by the 
twelve and other disciples ; and^ except 
upon one or two very extraordinary occa- 
sions he travelled along with them, and 
just as they did. Upon some occasions 
his own body was the subject of his mira- 
culous power. In its natural constitution, 
however, it was plainly the mortal body of 
a man. It suffered from inanition, from 
fatigue and external violence, and needed 
the refection of food, of rest, and sleep : 
It was confined by its gravity to the earth's 
surface: It was translated from one place 
to another by a successive motion through 
the intermediate space : And if, in a few 
instances, and upon some very extraordi- 
nary occasions, it was exempted from the 
action of mechanical powers, and divested 
of its physical qualities and relations, — as 
when to escape from the malice of a 
rabble, he made himself invisible, and 



201 



when he walked upon a stormy sea ; these 
were the only instances of our liOrd's mira- 
culous powers in his own person, which 
no more indicate a preternatural constitu- 
tion of his body, than his other miracles 
indicate a preternatural constitution of the 
bodies on which they were performed. 
That he walked upon the sea is no more a 
sign of an uncommon constitution of his 
own body, which sunk not, than of the 
water which sustained it. In every cir- 
cumstance, therefore, of his life, before his 
passion, the blessed Jesus appears a mortal 
man. An example of virtue he indeed 
exhibited, which never other man attained. 
But the example was of human virtues ; 
of piety, of temperance, of benevolence, 
and of whatever in the life of man is laud- 
able. Before his resurrection it was in 
power only, and in knowledge, that he 
showed himself divine. 



202 



After his resurrection the change is won- 
derful ; insomuch that, except in certain 
actions which were done to give his disci- 
ples proof that they saw in him their cru- 
cified Lord arisen from the grave, he seems 
to have done nothing like a common man. 
Whatever, was natural to him before seems 
now miraculous ; what was before miracu- 
lous is now natural. 

The change first appears in the manner 
of his resurrection. It is evident that he 
had left the sepulchre before it was open- 
ed. An angel, indeed, was sent to roll 
^way the stone ; but this was not to let the 
Lord out, but to let the women in. For 
no sooner was the thing done than the 
angel said to the women, " JHe is not here, 
" he is risen ; come and see the place 
where the Lord lay." St. Matthew's 
women saw the whole process of the open- 
ing of the sepulchre ; for they were there 



203 



before it was opened. They felt the earth 
quake ; — they saw the angel of the Lord 
descend from heaven ; — they saw him roll 
away the vast stone which stopped the 
mouth of the sepulchre, and, with a threat- 
ening aspect, seat himself upon it ; — they 
saw the sentinels fall down petrified with 
fear. Had the Lord been waiting within 
the tomb for the removal of the stone, 
whence was it that they saw him not walk 
out? If he had a body to be confined, 
he had a body to be actually visible ; and 
it is not to be supposed, that with or with- 
out the heavenly guard which now at- 
tended him, he was in fear of being taken 
by the sentinels and put a second time to 
death, that for his security he , should ren- 
der himself invisible. But he was already 
gone. The huge stone, which would have 
barred their entrance, had been no bar to 
his escape. 



204 



With the manner of leaving the sepul- 
chre, his appearances first to the women, 
afterwards to the apostles, correspond. 
They were for the most part unforeseen 
and sudden ; nor less suddenly he disap- 
peared. He was found in company with- 
out coming in ; he was missing again with- 
out going away. He joined, indeed, the 
two disciples on the road to Emmaus, like 
a traveller passing the same way ; and he 
walked along with them, in order to pre- 
pare them by his conversation for the evi- 
dence which they were to receive of his 
resurrection. But no sooner was the dis- 
covery made, by a peculiar attitude which 
he assumed in the breaking of bread, than 
he disappeared instantaneously. The same 
evening he presented himself to the apostles, 
at a late hour, assembled in a room with 
the doors shut ; that is, fast made up with 
bolts and bars, for fear of a visit from the 



205 



unbelieving Jews, their persecutors. To 
him who had departed from the unopened 
sepulchre, it was no difficulty to enter the 
barricadoed chamber. From all these cir- 
cumstances, it is evident that his body had 
undergone its change. The corruptible 
had put on incorruption. It was no longer 
the body of a man in its mortal state ; it 
was the body of a man raised to life and 
immortality, which was now mysteriously 
united to divinity. And as it was by 
miracle that, before his death, he walked 
upon the sea, it was now by miracle that, 
for the conviction of the apostles, he showed 
in his person the marks of his suffer- 
ings. 

Consonant with this exaltation of his 
human nature, was the change in the man- 
ner of his life. He was repeatedly seen by 
the disciples after his resurrection ; and so 
seen as to give them many infallible proofs 



206 



that he was the very Jesus who had suf- 
fered on the cross. But he lived not with 
them in familiar habits. His time, for the 
forty days preceding his ascension, was 
not spent in their society. They knew 
not his goings out and comings in. Where 
he lodo;ed on the even in o; of his resurrec- 
tion, after his visit to the apostles, we read 
not ; nor were the apostles themselves 
better informed than we. To Thomas, 
who was absent when our Lord appeared, 
the report of the rest was in these words : 
" We have seen the Lord." That w^as all 
they had to say : Tliey had seen him, and 
he was gone. They pretend not to direct 
Thomas to any place where he might find 
him, and enjoy the same sight. None of 
them could now say to Thomas, as Natha- 
niel once said to Philip, " Come and see." 
On the journey from Jerusalem to Galilee, 
he was not their companion, — he went 



201 



before them. How he went we are not 
informed. The way is not described : The 
places are not mentioned through which 
he passed : Their names are not recorded 
who accompanied him on the road, or who 
entertained him. The disciples were com- 
manded to repair to Galilee. They were 
not told to seek him at Capernaum, his 
former residence, or to enquire for him at 
his mother's house. They were to assem- 
ble at a certain hill. Thither they repair- 
ed ; they met him there ; and there they 
worshipped him. The place of his abode 
for any single night of all the forty days is 
nowhere mentioned ; nor, from the most 
diligent examination of the story, is any 
place of his abode on earth to be assigned. 
The conclusion seems to be, that on earth 
he had no longer any local residence, his 
body requiring neither food for its subsist- 
ence, nor a lodging for its shelter and re- 



pose : He was become the inhabitant of 
another region, from which lie came occa- 
sionally to converse with his disciples. His 
visible ascension, at the expiration of the 
forty days, being not the necessary means 
of his removal, but a token to the disciples 
that this was his last visit ; an evidence to 
them that the heavens had now received 
him, and that he was to be seen no more 
on earth with the corporeal eye, till the 
restitution of all things. 

I might have been less particular in the 
detail of circumstances which lead to this 
conclusion, had it appeared in our English 
Bibles, as it does in the original, that St. 
Peter roundly asserts the very same thing 
in the words of my text : " Him God raised 
« up the third day," says St. Peter, " and 
" showed him openly," as our English 
Bibles have it, " not to all the people." 
But here is a manifest contradiction. Not 

7 



209 



to be shown to all the people, is not to be 
shown openly. To be shown openly, there- 
fore, not to all the people, is to be shown 
and not to be shown at the same time* 
The literal meaning of the Greek words is 
this, * " Him God raised up the third day, 
and gave him to be visible." Not openly 
visible ; no such thing is said ; it is the very 
thing denied : But, " He gave him to be 
^' visible." Jesus was no longer in a state 
to be naturally visible to any man. His 
body was indeed risen, but it was become 
that body which St. Paul describes in the 
fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the 
Corinthians, w^hich having no sympathy with 
the gross bodies of this earthly sphere, nor 
any place among them, must be indiscer- 



* Et dedit eum manifestum fieri. — Vulg, Et dedit eum 
ut conspicietur aperte. — Tremell ex Syr. Fecitque ut is 
conspicuus fieret. — Beza. 



210 

nible to the human organs, till they shall 
have undergone a similar refinement. The 
divinity united to the blessed Jesus pro- 
duced, in a short space, that change in 
him which, in other men, according to the 
mysterious physics of St. Paul, must be the 
effect of a slower process. The divinity 
united to him having raised him on the 
third day from the grave, in a body incor- 
ruptible and invisible, gave him to become 
visible occasionally, not to all the people, 
but to his chosen witnesses ; to those who 
were chosen to the privilege of beholding 
God face to face in the person of his Son, 
of attesting the fact of Christ's resurrection, 
and of publishing through the world the 
glad tidings of the general redemption. 

Thus, you see, every appearance of our 
Lord to the apostles, after his resurrection, 
was in truth an appearance of the great 
God, the Maker of Heaven and earth, to 



211 



mortal man. The conferences, though 
frequent, seem to have been short, and 
upon each occasion mixed with, that con- 
descension which was necessary to give 
the disciples sensible evidence of the reality 
of the resurrection. We discover much 
of a reserved dignity in his deportment ; a 
tone of high authority prevails in his lan- 
guage, and something profoundly myste- 
rious in his actions. His familiar convers- 
ation with the world before his passion, 
was a principal branch of his humiliation ; 
and his humiliation was an essential part 
of those sufferings by which the guilt of 
man was expiated. But the atonement 
being once made, the form of a servant 
was to be removed ; Christ was to reassume 
his glory, and to be seen no more but as 
the only-begotten of the Father. 

Would you now ask. Why Jesus after 
his resurrection was not rendered visible 

p 2 



212 



to all the people? Will you not rather 
stand aghast at the impiety of the question ? 
Ask, Why God is of purer eyes than to 
behold iniquity ? Ask, Why he who con- 
versed with Abraham as a man talketh 
with his friend, conversed not but in judg- 
ment with the vile inhabitants of Sodom ? 
Ask, Why Moses only of all the congrega- 
tion, was allowed to enter the thick dark- 
ness where God was ? The appearances 
to the apostles after the resurrection were 
of the same kind with the a ppearances, 
in the earliest ages, to the patriarchs and 
the chosen rulers of the Jewish nation. 
He who, to converse with Abraham, veiled 
his glory in a traveller's disguise ; he who 
appeared to Joshua, under the walls of 
Jericho, in the habit of a warrior, with his 
sword ready drawn for the attack ; he who 
was seen by Gideon and Manoah in the 



213 



human form ; the same showed himself at 
the sepulchre to Mary Magdalen, in the 
form of a gardener ; to the two disciples on 
the road to Emmaus, as a wayfaring man ; 
to the eleven separately, or altogether, in 
various forms, at various times; upon every 
occasion, in the manner of his appearance, 
manifesting his exaltation, and yet finding 
means to afford them satisfactory proofs 
that he was the same Jesus who had died. 

It is true, that in those earlier ages the 
ever-blessed Son of God appeared in a 
body assumed, it is probable, for each par- 
ticular occasion, whereas his appearances 
after the resurrection were in that perman- 
ent body to which, after Mary's concep- 
tion, he was inseparably united. But this 
circumstance may hardly be supposed to 
make any material difference. The dif- 
ference, whatever it may seem, was over- 

p 3 



214 



looked by St. Paul*, who, in the 15th chap- 



enumerating the principal appearances after 



his conversion. The mention of this, as 
the last in order, shows that he considered 
it as of the same kind with all the rest. 
But this appearance to St. Paul, was an 

* The argument drawn, in this paragraph, from the ap- 
pearance to St. Paul, may seem in some degree precarious. 
Because it may be thought uncertain, whether the appear- 
ance mentioned, 1 Cor. XV. 8., be that on the road to Damas- 
cus, or the vision afterwards in the temple. This latter was 
a vision to the apostle in a trance. It appears not certainly 
that Jesus was in this instance seen in the human form ; but 
the CONTRARY appears not. However, as the apostle saw 
this vision in a trance, it seems more reasonable to under- 
stand what is said, 1 Cor. xv. 8., of the appearance on the road 
to Damascus, when the apostle was in no trance. For what 
men see entranced, is generally deemed less real than what 
they see in their natural state, and less fit to be alleged in 
evidence or argument. 



ter of his first 




Corinthians, 




215 



appearance of the Lord in glory. It was 
no less an appearance of God, in the form 
of God, than that to Moses at the bush. 
St. Paul saw nothing but that tremendous 
light, which struck himself and his com- 
panions to the ground. He saw not the man 
Jesus, he saw only the light — the token of 
the divine presence; and from the midst 
of that light he heard the voice of Jesus 
speaking. Yet this appearance, in which 
the human form of Jesus was not rendered 
visible, is mentioned as the last instance 
in which Jesus was seen after his resurrec- 
tion ; which proves, that all the rest in 
which the human form was seen, were con- 
sidered by the apostles as, equally with 
this, manifestations of the Deity. 

This circumstance, the confessed divi- 
nity of the person who appeared, wai the 
obstacle to public appearances. The Jew- 
ish nation, in the rejectipn of our Lord, 

p 4 



216 



had filled tlie measure of its guilt. They 
were cast off. God no longer held his 
visible residence among them ; and hence- 
forward he was to be found only in the 
Christian church. Our Saviour had, ac- 
cordingly, publicly warned the Jews, when 
he was led to crucifixion, that " they should 
" see him no more'^ till they should be pre- 
pared to acknowledge his authority. He 
had privately told the apostles that " they 
should see him again, but the world should 
" see him no more.^^ In conformity with 
these predictions of his own, and with 
the whole plan of revelation, his single 
public appearance after the resurrection 
was not at Jerusalem, but in a remote 
corner of Galilee, which was in some 
degree a selection of spectators. It is 
remarkable, that Ananias tells St. Paul, 
that God had chosen him to see the Just 
One. In short, from every circumstance 



217 



of the story of the forty days which inter- 
vened between our Lord's resurrection and 
his visible ascension, from the assertion of 
my text, and from the intimations of other 
passages of Scripture, it is evident that 
our Lord arisen from the grave, could not 
be shown openly to all the people : He 
could not resume his familiar conversation 
with the world; because they who may 
be admitted to this immediate communion 
with the Deity must be persons distin- 
guished by their godly dispositions from 
the mass of the corrupt world, and chosen 
by God himself to so high a privilege. 

Hence we are taught the universal im- 
portance of the precept so often inculcated 
upon the Israelites under the law, and 
adopted by St. Peter as a general maxim 
of the Christian's duty, " Be ye holy, for 
" I, Jehovah, your God, am holy." If the 
want of holiness excluded the mass of the 



218 



Jewish people from that sight of God, in 
the person of our Lord, which was granted 
to the apostles and other believers here on 
earth, and from the benefits which that 
sight might have conveyed to them, — the 
testimony of their own senses to the truth 
of our Lord's pretensions, and the certainty 
thence arising of the salvation of the 
faithful ; much more shall the want of holi- 
ness finally exclude from the sight of God 
in Heaven, and from that fulness of joy 
which shall be the portion of those who 
shall be admitted to his presence. To see 
the Godhead in the person of our Lord, is 
proposed to the Christian's hope as the 
highest privilege of the saints that shall 
overcome. The physical capacity of this 
vision is placed by St. John in a resem- 
blance and sympathy that the glorified 
bodies of the saints shall bear to the body 
of our Lord in glory. We know," says 



219 



St. John, that when he shall appear we 
" shall be like him we must be like him, 
" because we shall see him as he is." St. 
Paul speaks with no less confidence of the 
resemblance we shall bear to him. " Our 
" Lord Jesus Christ," he says, " shall change 
" our vile body, that it may be fashioned 
" like unto his glorious body, according to 
" the workings whereby he is able to sub- 
" due all things to himself" Or, as the 
passage might more properly be rendered, 
" Who shall cause the fashion of our body 
" of humiliation to be made like unto his 
" body of glory, according to the energy 
" of his power of subduing all things to 
" himself" This transformation of the 
bodies of the faithful, by the power of our 
Lord, requires a previous transformation 
of the mind to a resemblance of him, by 
faith in his word, by reliance on his atone- 
ment, by conformity to his precepts, and 



220 



imitation of his example. For he that hath 
this hope in him, of being transformed 
into the likeness of his Lord, of seeing him 
as he now is, and of standing for ever in 
his presence ; he that hath this hope " puri- 
" fieth himself as he is pure." 



FIVE SERMONS. 



SERMON I. 



Psalms, xcvii. 7. 

" Worship Mm^ all ye godsJ^ 

It should be a rule with every one who 
would read the Holy Scriptures with ad- 
vantage and improvement, to compare 
every text, which may seem either import- 
ant for the doctrine it may contain, or 
remarkable for the turn of the expression, 
with the parallel passages in other parts of 
holy writ ; that is, with the passages in 
which the subject-matter is the same, the 
sense equivalent, or the turn of the expres- 



224 



sion similar. These parallel passages are 
easily found by the marginal references in 
the Bibles of the larger form. It were to 
be wished, indeed, that no Bibles were 
printed without the margin. It is to be 
hoped that the objection obviously arising 
from the necessary augmentation in the 
price of the book may some time or other 
be removed by the charity of religious as- 
sociations. The Society for the Promotion 
of Christian Knowledge could not more 
effectually serve the purpose of their pious 
institution, than by applying some part of 
their funds to the printing of Bibles, in 
other respects in an ordinary way, for the 
use of the poor, but with a full margin. 
Meanwhile those who can afford to pur- 
chase the larger Bibles should be dilligent 
in the improvement of the means with 
which Providence has furnished them. 
Particular diligence should be used in 



225 



comparing the parallel texts of the Old and 
the New Testaments. When you read the 
Old Testament, if you perceive by the 
margin that any particular passage is cited 
in the New, turn to that passage of the 
New to which the margin refers, that you 
may see in what manner, in what sense, 
and to what purpose, the words of the 
more antient are alleged by the later 
writer, who, in many instances, may be 
supposed to have received clearer light 
upon the same subject. On the other hand, 
when in the New Testament you meet 
with citations from the Old, always con- 
sult the original writer, that you may have 
the satisfaction of judging for yourselves, 
how far the passage alleged makes for the 
argument which it is brought to support. 
In doing this you will imitate the example 
of the godly Jews of Beroea, which is re- 
corded with approbation in the Acts of 



226 



the Apostles, who, when Paul and Silas 
reasoned with them out of the Scriptures 
of the Old Testament, clearly setting be- 
fore them the prophecies concerning the 
Messiah, and the accomplishment of those 
prophecies in Jesus, whom they preached, 
" searched the Scriptures daily, whether 
" these things were so." These Beroean 
Jews compared the parallel passages of 
St. Paul's oral doctrine, with the written 
Scriptures of the Old Testament. And we 
now should with equal diligence compare 
the written doctrine of St. Paul, and of his 
fellow-labourers, with the writings of the 
Old Testament. It is incredible to any 
one, who has not in some degree made the 
experiment, w^hat a proficiency may be 
made in that knowledge which maketh 
wise unto salvation, by studying the Scrip- 
tures in this manner, without any other 
commentary or exposition than what the 



227 



different parts of the sacred volume mu- 
tually furnish for each other. I will not 
scruple to assert, that the most illiterate 
Christian, if he can but read his English 
Bible, and will take the pains to read it in 
this manner, will not only attain all that 
practical knowledge which is necessary to 
his salvation, but, by God's blessing, he 
will become learned in every thing relating 
to his religion in such degree, that he will 
not be liable to be misled, either by the 
refined arguments, or by the false assertions 
of those who endeavour to ingraft their 
own opinion upon the oracles of God. 
He may safely be ignorant of all philoso- 
phy, except what is to be learned from the 
sacred books ; which indeed contain the 
highest philosophy adapted to the lowest 
apprehensions. He may safely remain 
ignorant of all history, except so much of 
the history of the first ages of the Jewish 

Q 2 



228 



and of the Cln-istian church, as is to be 
gathered from the canonical books of the 
Old and New Testament. Let him study 
these in the manner I recommend, and 
let him never cease to pray for the illumin- 
ation of that Spirit, by which these books 
were dictated ; and the whole compass of 
abstruse philosophy and recondite history, 
shall furnish no argument with which the 
perverse will of man shall be able to shake 
this learned Christian's faith. The Bible 
thus studied, will indeed prove to be what 
we Protestants esteem it, a certain and suf- 
ficient rule of faith and practice, a helmet 
of salvation, which alone may quench the 
fiery darts of the wicked. My text, I trust, 
will prove a striking instance of the truth 
of these assertions. 

If, in argument with any of the false 
teachers of the present day, I were to 
allege this text of the Psalmist in proof of 



229 



our Lord's divinity, my antagonist would 
probably reply, that our Lord is not once 
mentioned in the psalm ; that the subject 
of the psalm is an assertion of the proper 
divinity of Jehovah, the God of the Israel- 
ites, as distinguished from the imaginary 
deities which the heathen worshipped. 
This psalm, therefore, which proposes Jeho- 
vah, the God of the Israelites, as the sole 
object of worship to men and angels, is al- 
leged, he would say, to no purpose, in justi- 
fication of worship paid to another person. 
And to any one, who might know nothing 
more of the true sense of this passage than 
may appear in the words taken by them- 
selves, my adversary might seem to have 
the better in the argument. I think I 
should seem to myself to stand confuted, 
if I knew no more of the meaning of my 
text, or rather of the inspired song of which 
it makes a part, than an inattentive reader 

Q 3 



230 



might collect from a hasty view of its 
general purport. But observe the refer- 
ences in the margin of the Bible, and you 
will find that a parallel passage occurs in 
the epistle to the Hebrews, in the first 
chapter at the sixth verse. Turn to this 
passage of the epistle, and there you will 
find this text of the Psalmist cited by St 
Paul to this very purpose ; namely, to prove 
that adoration is due from the blessed 
angels of God to the only-begotten Son j 
for thus he reasons : " When he bringeth 
" in the First Begotten into the world, he 
" saith. And let all the Angels of God wor- 
" ship him." The only passage in the Old 
Testament, as the Hebrew text now stands, 
is this seventh verse of the ninety-seventh 
psalm. The words of the Psalmist, indeed, 
are these : " Worship him, all ye gods." 
The Apostle, that he might clearly exclude 
a plurality of gods, while he asserts the 



231 



Godhead of the Son. thinks proper to ex- 
plain the Psalmist's words, by substituting 
" all the angels of God" for « all the gods." 
But it is very evident that the First Be- 
gotten was, in the apostle's judgment, the 
object of worship propounded by the 
Psalmist; otherwise, these words of the 
Psalmist, in which he calls upon the angels 
to worship Jehovah, were alleged to no 
purpose in proof of the Son's natural pre- 
eminence above the angels. For either 
the Son is the object of worship intended 
by the Psalmist, or the Son himself is to 
bear a part in the worship so universally 
enjoined. 

But, further, the collation of the Psalmist's 
text with the apostle's citation, will not only 
enable the unlearned Christian to discover 
a sense of the Psalmist's words not very 
obvious in the words themselves, but it 
will also give him certain, although sum- 

Q 4 



232 



mary, information upon a point of eccle- 
siastical antiquity of great importance, upon 
which the illiterate cannot be informed 
by any other means. In the late attempts 
to revive the Ebionaean heresy, much stress 
has been laid, by the leaders of the impious 
confederacy, upon the opinions of the pri- 
mitive church of Jerusalem. They tell 
you, with great confidence, that the Re- 
deemer was never worshipped, nor his di- 
vinity acknowledged, by the members of 
that church. The assertion has, indeed, no 
other foundation but the ignorance of those 
who make it, who confound a miserable 
sect, which separated from the church of 
Jerusalem, with the church itself. But 
how is the truth of the fact to be proved 
to the illiteiate Christian, unread in the 
history of the primitive ages, who yet must 
feel some alarm and disquietude when he 
is told, that he has been catechized in a 



233 



faith never held by those first and best 
Christians, the converts of the apostles, 
among whom James, the brother of our 
Lord, was bishop. Holy writ, if he is 
diligent in consulting it, will relieve his 
scruples, and remove his doubts, not only 
upon the principal matter in dispute, but 
upon this particular historical question. 
It must be obvious to every understanding, 
that when any passage of the Old Testa- 
ment is cited by writers of the New, in con- 
firmation of any particular doctrine, with- 
out any disquisition concerning the sense 
of the citation, or any attempt to fix a par- 
ticular sense upon it which may suit the 
writer's purpose ; it must be evident, I say, 
that a text thus cited, without any solici- 
tude to settle its true meaning, was gene- 
rally understood at the time by those to 
whom the argument was addressed. For 
a text alleged in any sense not generally 



234 



admitted could be no proof to those who 
should be inclined to call in question the 
sense imposed. The Hebrews, therefore, 
to whom the apostle produces this text of 
the Psalmist in proof of the high dig- 
nity of the Redeemer's nature, agreed with 
the apostle concerning the sense of the 
Psalmist's words. They well understood 
that the Psalmist calls upon the angels to 
worship the only-begotten Son. And who 
were these Hebrews ? The very name im- 
ports that they were Jews by birth : They 
were indeed the Jewish converts settled in 
Palestine. And since the epistle was writ- 
ten during St. Paul's first imprisonment at 
Rome, which might easily be made to ap- 
pear from the epistle itself, and St. Paul's 
first imprisonment at Rome ended about 
the thirtieth year after our Lord's ascension, 
they were no other than the first race of 
Jewish Christians, who agreed with St. Paul 



235 



that the Redeemer is the object of worship 
propounded to the angels by the Psalmist. 
And thus, by this plain remark, and by 
the authority of the sacred books, the un- 
learned Christian may settle his own mind, 
and put to shame and silence the disturbers 
of his faith. 

But this is not the whole of the informa- 
tion which the unlearned Christian may 
draw from the Psalmist's text compared 
with the apostle's citation. The apostle 
cites the Psalmist's words as spoken when 
the First Begotten was introduced into the 
world, that is to say, to mankind ; for the 
word, in the original, literally signifies not 
the universe, for in that world the First 
Begotten ever was from its first formation, 
but this globe, which is inhabited by men, 
to which^ the First Begotten was in these 
later ages introduced by the promulgation 
of the Gospel. Now, since the occasion 



236 



upon which these words were spoken was 
an introduction of the First Begotten into 
the world, if these words are nowhere to 
be found but in the ninety-seventh psalm, 
it follows that this ninety-seventh psalm is 
that introduction of the First Begotten into 
the world of which the apostle speaks. — 
Hence the unlearned Christian may derive 
this useful information, that the true sub- 
ject of the ninety-seventh psalm, as it was 
understood by St. Paul and by the church 
of Jerusalem, to which this epistle is ad- 
dressed, within thirty years after our Lord's 
ascension, when that church must have 
been entirely composed of our Lord's own 
followers and the immediate converts of 
the apostles, was not, as it might seem to 
any one not deeply versed in the prophetic 
language, an assertion of God's natural do- 
minion over the universe, but a prophecy 
of the establishment of the Messiah's king- 



237 



dom by the preaching of the Gospel, and 
the general conversion of idolaters to the 
service of the true God. The First Be- 
gotten is the Lord, or rather the Jehovah, 
for that is the word used in the original, 
whose kingdom is proclaimed as an occa- 
sion of joy and thanksgiving to the whole 
world. 

And that this was no arbitrary interpret- 
ation of the psalm, imagined by enthu- 
siasts, or invented by impostors, to make 
the sacred oracles accord with their own 
conceits, or with their own designs, will 
appear by a closer inspection of the psalm 
itself, which cannot be consistently ex- 
pounded of any other king or of any other 
kingdom. 

That Jehovah's kingdom in some sense 
or other is the subject of this divine song, 
cannot be made a question, for thus it 
opens — "Jehovah reignetli." The psalm. 



238 



therefore, must be understood either of 
God's natural kingdom over his whole 
creation ; of his particular kingdom over 
the Jews, his chosen people ; or of that 
kingdom which is called m the New Tes- 
tament the kingdom of Heaven, the king- 
dom of God, or the kingdom of Christ* 
For of any other kingdom of God, besides 
these three, man never heard or read. God's 
peculiar kingdom over the Jews cannot 
be the subject of this psalm, because all 
nations of the earth are called upon to re- 
joice in the acknowledgment of this great 
truth, " Jehovah reigneth, let the earth 
" rejoice ; let the many isles be glad 
" thereof." The many isles are the various 
regions of the habitable world : For the 
word isles in the Old Testament denotes a 
region circumscribed by certain boundaries 
though not surrounded by the sea ; as ap- 
pears by the use of it in the tenth chapter 

9 



239 



of Genesis, at the fifth verse, where the 
sacred writer says of the sons of Japheth, 
mentioned in the three preceding verses, 
" By these were the isles of the Gentiles 
" divided," though all the sons of Japheth 
had their settlements either in the Asiatic 
or the European continent. The same 
consideration, that Jehovah's kingdom is 
mentioned as a subject of general thanks- 
giving, proves that God's universal domi- 
nion over his whole creation cannot be the 
kingdom in the prophet's mind : For in 
this kingdom a great majority of the antient 
world, the idolaters, were considered, not 
as subjects w^ho might rejoice in the glory 
of their Monarch, but as rebels who had 
every thing to fear from his just resent- 
ment. God's government of the world 
was to them no cause of joy, otherwise than 
as the erection of Christ's kingdom, which 
was to be the means of their deliverance, 



240 



was a part of tire general scheme of Provi- 
dence. It remains, therefore, that Christ's 
kingdom is that kingdom of Jehovah, which 
the inspired poet celebrates as the occasion 
of universal joy. And this will further 
appear by the sequel of the song. After 
four verses, in which the transcendent 
glory, the irresistible power, and inscrut- 
able perfection of the Lord, who, to the 
joy of all nations, reigneth, are painted 
in poetical images, taken partly from the 
awful scene on Sinai which accompanied 
the delivery of the law, partly from other 
manifestations of God's presence with the 
Israelites in their journey through the wil- 
derness; he proceeds, in the sixth verse, 
" The heavens declare his righteousness, 
and all the people see his glory." We 
read in the nineteenth psalm, that " the 
" heavens declare the glory of God." And 
the glory of God, the power and the intel- 



241 

ligence of the Creator, is indeed visibly de- 
clared in the fabric of the material world. 
But I cannot see how the structure of the 
heavens can demonstrate the righteousness 
of God. Wisdom and power may be dis- 
played in the contrivance of an inanimate 
machine ; but righteousness cannot appear 
in the arrangement of the parts, or the di- 
rection of the motions of lifeless matter. 
The heavens, therefore, in their external 
structure, cannot declare their Maker's 
righteousness : But the heavens, in another 
sense, attested the righteousness of Christ, 
when the voice from heaven declared him 
the beloved Son of God, in whom the 
Father was well pleased j and when the 
preternatural darkness of the sun at the 
crucifixion, and other agonies of nature, 
drew that confession from the heathen cen- 
turion who attended the execution, that 
the suffering Jesus was the Son of God: 

li 



242 



" And dl the people see his glory." It is 
much to be regretted that our translators, 
over studious of the purity of their English 
style, have, through the whole Bible, ne- 
glected a distinction constantly observed 
in the original, between people in the singu- 
lar, and peoples in the plural. The word 
people^ in the singular, for the most part 
denotes God's chosen people, the Jewish 
nation, unless any other particular people 
happen to be the subject of discourse. 
But peoples^ in the plural, is put for all the 
other races of mankind, as distinct from 
the chosen people. The Word here is in 
the plural form, " And all the peoples see 
" his glory." But when or in what sense did 
any of the peoples, the idolatrous nations, 
see the glory of God? Literally they never 
saw his glory. The effulgence of the Shechi- 
nah never was displayed to them, except 
when it blazed forth upon the Egyptians 



243 



to strike them with a panic ; or when the 
towering pillar of flame, which marshalled 
the Israelites in the wilderness, was seen 
by the inhabitants of Palestine and Arabia 
as a threatening meteor in their sky. In- 
tellectually, no idolaters ever saw the glory 
of God, for they never acknowledged his 
power and Godhead : had they thus seen 
his glory, they had ceased to be idolaters. 
But all the peoples, upon the preaching of 
the Gospel, saw the glory of Christ. They 
saw it literally in the miracles performed 
by his apostles ; they saw it spiritually 
when they perceived the purity of his pre- 
cepts, when they acknowledged the truth 
of his doctrine, when they embraced the 
profession of Christianity, and owned 
Christ for their Saviour and their God. 
The Psalmist goes on; " Confounded be 
" all they that serve graven images, that 
" boast themselves of idols : Worship him, 

R 2 



244 



all ye gods." In the original this verse 
has not at all the form of a malediction, 
which it has acquired in our translation 
from the use of the strong word confounded, 
" Let them be xtshamed»' This is the utmost 
that the Psalmist says. The prayer that 
they may be ashamed of their folly, and 
repent of it, is very different from an im- 
precation of confusion. But in truth the 
Psalmist rather seems to speak prophetic- 
ally, without any thing either of prayer 
or imprecation — "they shall be ashamed." 
Having seen the glory of Christ, they shall 
be ashamed of the idols which in the times 
of their ignorance they worshipped. In 
the eighth and ninth verses, looking for- 
ward to the times when the fulness of the 
Gentiles shall be come in, and the remnant 
of Israel shall turn to the Lord, he de- 
scribes the daughters of Judah as rejoicing 
at the news of the mercy extended to the 



245 



Gentile world, and exulting in the univer- 
sal extent of Jehovah's kingdom, and the 
general acknowledgment of his Godhead* 
In the tenth verse, having the sufferings, 
as it should seem, in view, which the first 
preachers were destined to endure, he ex- 
horts those who love Jehovah to adhere at 
all hazards to their duty, in the assurance 
that their powerful Lord, on whom they 
have fixed their love, " preserveth the 
" souls of his saints, and delivereth them 
" out of the hand of the wicked." " Light," 
he adds, " is sown for the righteous or, 
to render the words more strictly, " Light 
" is shed over the Just One, and gladness 
" upon the upright of heart." The just 
and the just one are two different words ; 
the one a collective noun expressing a 
multitude, the other expressive of a single 
person. These two words are unfortu- 
nately confounded in our English Bibles. 

R 3 



246 



The Just One is, I think, in many pas- 
sages of the Psalms, of which I take this 
to be one, an appellation which exclusively 
belongs to Christ in his human character.* 
Light, or splendour, is an easy image for 
a condition of prosperity and grandeur. 
"Light is shed over the Just One, the 
" man Christ Jesus, who is now exalted 
" at the right hand of God." And light, 
if I mistake not, is, without any metaphor, 
literally shed over him. By virtue of his 
union to the second person of the God- 
head, this Just One, the man Christ, is 
now so taken into glory that he is become 
an inhabitant of the Shechinah, dwelling 
bodily in the centre of that insufferable 



* Psalm xxxiv. 19. " Great are the troubles of the Just 
*^ One, but Jehovah delivereth him out of all." And again, 
21. God shall slay the ungodly, and they that hate the 

Just One shall be made desolate." 

I ■ 



247 



light ; in which situation he showed him- 
self before he suffered to the three apostles 
on the Mount, to animate their faith, and 
after his ascension to the unconverted 
Saul, to check his persecuting zeal upon 
his journey to Damascus. Thus light, 
the light of God's own glory, is shed over 
the Just One, over the glorified person of 
our Lord. And this light thus shed on 
him is a source of gladness to all the up- 
right in heart. " Rejoice in Jehovah, there- 
fore, ye righteous, rejoice in him by whom 
ye are yourselves united to the first prin- 
ciple of goodness, being, power, happiness, 
and glory ; and give thanks at the remem- 
brance of his holiness." 

Thus by a brief, but I hope a perspi- 
cuous exposition of this whole psalm, I 
have shown you that every part of it 
easily applies to the subject of the Mes- 
siah's ascension to his kingdom, and that 

R 4 



248 



many parts of it cannot be expounded of 
any other kingdom of God. This psalm 
is indeed one of five psalms, from the^ 
ninety-sixth to the hundredth inclusive, 
which, if they are not all parts of one 
entire poem, at least all relate to the same 
subject, " the introduction of the First 
" Begotten to the world." Christ is the 
Jehovah whose dominion is proclaimed ; 
who is declared to be the God whom 
men and angels are bound to serve and 
worship. Such is he who for our de- 
liverance condescended to assume our 
nature, and upon this day was born of 
a pure virgin. For thus it seems the 
matter stood in the counsels of Eternal 
Wisdom : It behoved him " to be made 
" like unto his brethren, that he might be 
" a merciful and faithful High Priest in 
" things pertaining unto God, to make 
" reconciliation for the sins of the people." 



SERMON II. 



Romans, iv. 25, 

" Who was delivered for our offences, and 
" was raised again for our justification,^^ 

The manner in which the apostle con- 
nects, in these remarkable words, both the 
sufferings of Christ with the sins of men, 
and the resurrection of Christ with the ab- 
solution of the sinners, deserves a deep 
consideration, and leads, if I mistake not, 
to conclusions of the highest moment in 
speculation and in practice. The apostle 
not only speaks of the sins of men as the 
cause or occasion of our Lord's death. 



250 



but he speaks of the justification of men 
as equally the cause or occasion of his re- 
surrection. For the elucidation and im- 
provement of this doctrine, I shall treat 
the subject in the following order : — 

Firsts Taking the first clause of my text 
by itself, I shall inquire in what sense it 
may seem to be implied, in these expres- 
sions, " delivered for our offences," that the 
sins of mankind were the cause or occasion 
of Christ's sufferings. 

I shall, in the neoct place, show, that if 
aught of ambiguity may seem to adhere 
to these expressions, it is entirely removed 
by the similarity of connection which is 
alleged in the two clauses 'taken jointly ; 
between the sins of men, with the death of 
Christ, on the one hand, and the justifi- 
cation of men, with the resurrection of 
Christ, on the other. I shall show you, 
that the similarity of these connections, 



251 

men sinned, therefore Christ died, men are 
justified, therefore Christ was raised again, 
— necessarily leads to the particular notion 
6f Christ's death as an expiatory sacrifice, 
in the most literal meaning of which the 
words are capable ; that it leads to this^ 
notion of Christ's death in particular, be- 
cause it excludes all other notions of it. 

And, lastly^ I shall point out the import- 
ant consequences that follow from this great 
article of our faith — that Christ's blood 
was spilt for the expiation of the sins of the 
penitent. 

Now, for the sense in which it may 
seem to be asserted, that the sins of men 
were the cause or the occasion of our 
Lord's bitter sufferings and ignominious 
death; since his death, with all the cir- 
cumstances of pain and ignominy which 
attended it, was brought about by the 



252 



malice of his enemies, it may seem that, in 
this sense, the sins of men were literally the 
causes of his sufferings. But the apostle 
says, that he was delivered for " our 
" offences." The expression, " our of- 
" fences" is general, and cannot be ex- 
pounded of the particular sins of our Lord's 
personal enemies ; of the malice of the 
Pharisees, who procured his death ; of the 
perfidy of Judas, who betrayed him ; of 
the injustice of Pilate, who, against his 
own conscience, and in defiance of the 
divine warnings, condemned him ; of the 
cruelty of the Jewish populace, who de- 
rided him in his agonies. Of any or of all 
of these particular sins of the persons con- 
cerned, as contrivers, as directors, as instru- 
ments, or as gratified spectators in the 
horrid business of his death, the apostle's 
expression, " our offences," is too general 
to be understood. It can only be ex- 



253 



pounded of the sins of all us men, or at 
least of all us Christians. 

Nor is it agreeable to the usual cast of 
the Scripture language, that the persons 
immediately concerned in procuring and 
in executing the unjust sentence upon our 
Lord, should be spoken of as the original 
agents or causes in the dreadful business 
of his death. They were only instruments 
in the hand of a higher cause. They were 
the instruments which Providence employ- 
ed to bring about the councils of his own 
wisdom. This is implied in the words of 
my text: " He was delivered for our of- 
" fences." These words, " he was deli- 
" vered," refer to a purpose and design of 
God's' over-ruling Providence, by which 
the Redeemer was delivered over to the 
pains which he endured. The unbelieving 
Jews, the false traitor^ the unrighteous 
judge^ the unfeeling executioner, the in- 



254 



suiting rabble, were but the instruments of 
that purpose, which, in some way or other, 
had a general respect to " our offences 
that is, to the offences of all us men, or, in 
the most limited sense in which the words 
can be taken, of all that portion of man- 
kind which should hereafter be brought to 
the knowledge and worship of that God 
who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead, 
and by faith in the crucified Redeemer, 
should become admissible to a share in 
those benefits, whatever they may be, in 
order to which the sufferings of the Son of 
God were ordained. 

If the single service which Christ render- 
ed to mankind was in the character of a 
teacher of religion ; if men were not' other- 
wise to be reclaimed from their vices, than 
fey the discovery which our Lord hath 
made of the different conditions of the 
righteous and the wicked in a future life; 



255 



if by this discovery every man once 
brought to a behef of the doctrine, might 
be reclaimed in such degree as to merit, by 
his future conduct, not only a free pardon 
of his past offences, but a share of those 
good things which " God hath prepared 
" for them that love him if our Lord's 
doctrine might of itself, in this way, be a 
remedy for the sins of men, and his suffer- 
ings and death were necessary only for the 
confirmation of his doctrine, — the sins of 
men might, figuratively and indirectly, be 
said to be the occasion of his death ; his 
doctrine being the means of their reform- 
ation, and his death the means of establish- 
ing his doctrine. But if the case really be, 
that nothing future can undo the past; 
that the guilt of past crimes cannot be 
done away by future innocence ; if, after 
we have done all that is commanded us, 
we are still to say, " we are unprofitable 



256 



" servants if we have incuTred guilt 
without so much as the ability of meriting 
reward ; if all that is commanded us, which, 
were it done, would not amount to merit, 
be still more than ever is performed; if 
the utmost height of human virtue consists 
in a perpetual conflict with appetites which 
are never totally subdued, in an endeavour 
after a perfection which never is attained ; 
if the case be, that " if we say," that is, 
if we who believe, if we Christians say 
" that we have no sin, we deceive our- 
" selves, and the truth is not in us if 
nevertheless the faith and veracity of God 
himself is pledged, " if we confess our 
" sins, to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse 
" us from all unrighteousness — " if it be 
" the blood of Christ which cleanseth us 
" from sin if the benefit of his death be 
in some degree extended to those who are 
unacquainted with his doctrine, who by 



257 



consequence are not within the reach of 
any influence that may be ascribed to his 
instruction, " for Christ is the propitiation 
" for our sins ; and not for ours only, but 

also for the sins of the whole world — it 
is evident that the Redeemer's death must 
have been otherwise available to the expi- 
ation of the sins of men, than by its remote 
effect upon the manners of mankind, by the 
confirmation which it affords of the truth of 
the Christian Revelation. 

Indeed, were it only as a proof of doc- 
trine, or as an example of patient suffering, 
that the death of Christ had been service- 
able to mankind, similar benefits would be, 
in some degree, to be ascribed to the suffer- 
ings of many of our Lord's first disciples. 
And yet, though the early martyrs were, 
in the common acceptation of the word, 
just men, who suffered unjustly for the ser- 
vice of God and for the good of man, and 



258 



in the cause of the true religion, yet it is 
. never said of them that they suffered " the 
" just for the unjust, that they might bring 
«^ us to God." 

We read not, that we have access to the 
Father through the blood of St. Peter or 
St. Paul ^ and yet, if the expiatory virtue 
of our Saviour's death consisted merely in 
what it contributed towards the reforma- 
tion of mankind, by giving evidence and 
effect to his doctrine, it would be injustice 
to St. Peter and St. Paul, and all the other 
martyrs whose deaths contributed, in the 
same remote way, to the same effect, to 
deny them a share in the business of expi- 
ation. St. Paul, indeed, in the first chapter 
of his epistle to the Colossians, speaking 
of his own sufferings, says, that " he was 
" filling up in his own flesh that which was 
behind of the afflictions of Christ." But 
in this passage he is speaking of the church 



259 



under the image of Christ's body. By the 
afflictions of Christ, which he speaks of as 
unfinished, he means the afflictions of the 
church ; and he speaks of his own suffer- 
ings, not as supplying any supposed defi- 
ciency of our Lord's sufferings, but as fill- 
ing up the appointed measure of the afflic- 
tions of the church, and laying the foun- 
dation of its future prosperity and peace. 
Of the proper sufferings of our Lord in his 
own person, the apostles every where speak 
a very different language ; describing them 
as the means by which the apostles them- 
selves, no less than other Christians, were 
each individually reconciled to God, and 
admitted to the hope of future glory. " In 
" him we have redemption, through his 
" blood the forgiveness of sins." " The 
" blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanseth 
" us from all sin." "My blood is shed 
" for you," said our Lord himself to the 

s 2 



260 



apostles, " and for many, for the remission 
" of sins." Expressions of the like import 
so frequently occur in the sacred writings, 
the notion of the blood of Christ, as the 
matter of an expiatory sacrifice, is so stre- 
nuously inculcated, that it is not easy to 
conceive that nothing more is meant than 
to describe, in figurative expressions, the 
great importance of our Lord's death as a 
proof of his doctrine, when a similar im- 
portance might be ascribed to the deaths 
of other preachers, to which the same figure 
never is applied. It should rather seem 
that the blood of Christ had some direct 
and proper efficacy to expiate the guilt of 
men, independent of any remote effect upon 
their actions. 

That this is really the case, appears with 
the highest evidence from that view of the 
mystery of redemption, which my text, in 



261 



the second clause, more particularly sets 
forth, in which the resurrection of Christ 
is connected with our justification in the 
same manner as, in the first clause, his 
death is connected with our sins. As our 
Lord's death was, in the scheme of Provi- 
dence, the consequence of our sins, so, by 
the same scheme of Providence, his resur- 
rection was the consequence of our justifi- 
cation. 

The English expressions, it must be con^ 
fessed, are in themselves in some degree 
ambiguous. That he rose again " for our 
"justification," may be either an assertion 
that the justification of man naturally 
brought on the event of our Lord's resur- 
rection, or that their justification is some 
future benefit, which the event of Christ's 
resurrection shall, in due season, surely bring 
about ; and the latter may seem the more 
obvious sense of the expression. But that 

s 3 



262 



this is not the true exposition, even of the 
English words, evidently appears when 
the two clauses are considered in con- 
nection : For, as the death of Christ had no 
tendency to produce those offences for 
which he was delivered, but, on the con- 
trary, our offences were the reason of his 
humiliation, (and it were unreasonable to 
suppose that similar expressions should be 
used in opposite senses in different parts 
of the same sentence), our justification, for 
which Christ rose, must be something 
which, in the order of things, led to the 
Redeemer's resurrection. The original 
words are without ambiguity, and clearly 
represent our Lord's resurrection as an 
event which took place in consequence of 
man's justification, in the same manner as 
his death took place in consequence of 
man's sins. 



263 



It follows, therefore, that our justification 
is a thing totally distinct from the final 
salvation of the godly. It is some part of 
the wonderful business of redemption which 
was to be finished before our Lord, con^- 
sistently with the scheme of his great un- 
dertaking, could rise from the dead. It is 
something annexed to no condition on the 
part of man, a benefit freely and generally 
bestowed, without any regard to any pre- 
vious effect of the evangelical doctrine upob 
the lives of individuals. Now this is easily 
explained, if the death of Christ was lite- 
rally an atonement for the sins of the peni- 
tent ; but in any other view of the scheme 
of redemption it is inexplicable* 

Christ in his original nature, as the un- 
created Word, the ever-living Image of the 
Father, was incapable of sin, as he was far 
above all infirmity and imperfection. It 
were the height of impiety to imagine that 

s 4 



264 



it was for any sins of his own in a pre- 
existent state, that he was delivered over 
to a condition of weakness and mortality. 
Christ in assuming our mortal nature con- 
tracted nothing of the general pollution. 
The miraculous manner of his entrance 
into human life, excluded the possibility 
of his being touched with that contagion. 
He died not therefore for any share belong- 
ing to himself of the universal corruption. 
Christ in the form of a servant was subject 
to temptation, but still not liable to actual 
sin. He died not therefore for his own 
sins : He died as the proxy of guilty man. 
As he died not therefore for any delin- 
quency of his own, there was nothing to 
detain his soul in hell or his body in the 
grave ; nothing to protract his continuance 
in the condition of a dead man, that is, of 
an excuted criminal, when once the atone- 
ment of our sins was made, and the justice 



265 



of our offended God was satisfied. So 
soon as the expiation was complete, jus- 
tice required that the Redeemer's sufferings 
should terminate, and his resurrection to 
life and glory was the immediate conse- 
quence. Our justification, you will ob- 
serve, is quite a distinct thing from the 
final absolution of good men in the general 
judgment. Every man's final doom will 
depend upon the diligence which he uses 
in the present life, to improve under the 
means and motives for improvement which 
the Gospel furnishes. Our justification is 
the grace " in which we now stand." It 
is that general act of mercy which was pre- 
viously necessary on the part of God, to 
render the attainment of salvation possible 
to those who had once been wilfully rebel- 
lious, and to the last continue liable to the 
surprises of temptation. It is that act of 
mercy which conveys to all true penitents 



266 



a free pardon of all sins committed before 
conversion, and a free pardon of the sins 
of incurable infirmity after conversion. 
This act of mercy is the immediate benefit 
of Christ's death ; it hath no respect to any 
merits of the individuak to whom it is ap- 
plied ; its very foundation is, that all are 
concluded under sin ; it embraces all with- 
out distinction, and is procured by the sole 
merit of our Lord's atonement. If the 
purpose of the Redeemer's death was to 
procure this mercy, it is evident, that when 
he had endured what was necessary to pro- 
cure it, tlie purpose of his death was an- 
swered, and his resurrection could not but 
ensue. In any other view of the scheme 
of redemption, it is not easy to understand 
what that justification of man should be, 
of which the apostle speaks in the text as 
requisite in the order of things to the Re- 
deemer's resurrection. If any one ima- 



267 



gines, that the pardon of sin in the present 
life with that tolerance of man's infirmity^ 
the promise of which under the Gospel is 
the great motive to renewed obedience; — 
if any one imagines, that this double act 
of mercy, freely remitting past guilt, and 
accepting a sincere instead of a perfect 
obedience, proceeds from the pure benig- 
nity of God the father, in consideration 
of the sinner's own repentance, and with- 
out regard to the virtue of any atonement, 
he will find it difficult to assign a reason 
why the grant of the pardon upon these 
terms should follow rather than precede 
the death of Christ. He will find it diffi- 
cult to explain, upon what principle our 
justification should be an intermediate 
event between the death of Christ and his 
resurrection, rather than between his nati- 
vity and his baptism ; or upon what prin- 
ciple indeed it should be connected with 



268 



any particular circumstance in the life of 
Christ, more than with any imaginable cir- 
cumstance in the life of any other many — 
of Pontius Pilate for instance, or Gamaliel. 
The text, therefore, is one remarkable pas- 
sage out of a great number which exhibits 
such a view of the scheme of redemption 
which is incapable of any rational exposi- 
tion, if the notion of Christ's death as an 
actual atonement for the sins of men be 
rejected. 

This doctrine of an atonement, by which 
the repenting sinner may recover, as it 
were, his lost character of innocence, and 
by which the involuntary deficiencies are 
supplied of his renewed obedience, is so 
full of comfort to the godly, so soothing 
to the natural fears of the awakened sin- 
ner's conscience, that it may be deemed a 
dreadful indication of the great obduracy 
of men, that a discovery of a scheme of 



269 

mercy, which might have been expected to 
have been the great recommendation of 
the Gospel to a world lost and dead in 
trespasses and sins, the means of procuring 
it an easy and favourable reception, should 
itself have been made the ground of cavil 
and objection. And it is a still worse 
symptom of the hardened hearts of men, 
if, among those who profess themselves 
disciples of a crucified Saviour, any may 
be found who allow no real efficacy to 
that " blood of sprinkling which speaketh 
" better things than the blood of Abel." 
Let us rather charitably hope, that this 
misbelief and contradiction have arisen 
from some misapprehension of the Scrip- 
ture doctrine, and that the real doctrine 
of our Lord's atonement has all the while 
had no opponents. Those who speak of 
the wrath of God as appeased by Christ's 
sufferings, speak, it must be confessed, a 



270 



figurative language. The Scriptures speak 
figuratively when they ascribe wrath to 
God. The divine nature is insusceptible 
of the perturbations of passion ; and when 
it is said that God is angry, it is a figure 
which conveys this useful warning to man- 
kind, that God will be determined by his 
wisdom, and by his providential care of 
his creation, to deal with the wicked as a 
prince in anger deals with rebellious sub- 
jects. It is an extension of the figure 
when it is said, that God's wrath is by any 
means appeased. It is a figure, therefore, 
if it be said that God's wrath is appeased 
by the sufferings of Christ. It is not to 
be supposed that the sins of men excite 
in God any appetite of vengeance, which 
could not be diverted from its purpose of 
punishment till it had found its gratifica- 
tion in the sufferings of a righteous person. 
This, indeed, were a view of our redemption 



271 



founded on a false and unworthy notion 
of the divine character. But nothing hin- 
ders but that the sufferings of Christ, which 
could only in a figurative sense be an ap- 
peasement or satisfaction of God's xmmtJiy 
might be, in the most literal meaning of 
the words, a satisfaction to his Justice. It 
is easy to understand that the interests of 
God's government, the peace and order of 
the great kingdom over w^hich he rules the 
whole world of moral agents, might require 
that his disapprobation of sin should be 
solemnly declared and testified in his man- 
ner of forgiving it: It is easy to under- 
stand, that the exaction of vicarious suffer- 
ings on the part of him who undertook to 
be the intercessor for a rebellious race 
amounted to such a declaration. These 
sufferings, by which the end of punishment 
might be answered, being once sustained, 
it h easy to perceive, that the same prin- 



272 



ciple of wisdom, the same providential 
care of his creation, which must have deter- 
mined the Deity to inflict punishment, had 
no atonement been made, would now de- 
termine him to spare. Thus, to speak 
figuratively, his anger was appeased, but 
his justice was literally satisfied ; and the 
sins of men no longer calling for punish- 
ment when the ends of punishment were 
secured, were literally expiated. The per- 
son sustaining the sufferings in considera- 
tion of which the guilt of others may, con- 
sistently with the principles of good policy, 
be remitted, was in the literal sense of the 
word, so literally as no other victim ever 
was, a sacrifice, and his blood shed for the 
remission of sin was literally the matter 
of the expiation. 



It now only remains that I point out to 
you, as distinctly as the time will permit, 



273 



the important lessons to be drawn from 
this view of the scheme of man's redemp- 
tion. 

First) then, we learn from it that sin 
must be something far more hateful in its 
nature, something of a deeper malignity, 
than is generally understood. It could be 
no inconsiderable evil that could require 
such a remedy as the humiliation of the 
second Person in the Godhead. It is not 
to be supposed, that any light cause would 
move the merciful Father of the universe 
to expose even an innocent man to unme- 
rited sufferings. What must be the enor- 
mity of that guilt, which God's mercy 
could not pardon till the only begotten 
Son of God had undergone its punish- 
ment ? How great must be the load of 
crime, which could find no adequate atone- 
ment till the Son of God descended from 
the bosom of the Father, clothed himself 



274 



with flesh, and being found in fashion as 
a man, submitted to a life of hardship and 
contempt, to a death of ignominy and 
pain ? 

Again, we learn that the good or ill con- 
duct of man is a thing of far more im- 
portance and concern in the moral system 
than is generally imagined. Man's devia- 
tion from his duty was a disorder, it seems, 
in the moral system of the universe, for 
which nothing less than divine wisdom 
could devise a remedy, — the remedy de- 
vised nothing less than divine love and 
power could apply. Man's disobedience 
was in the moral world what it would be 
in the natural, if a planet were to wander 
from its orbit, or the constellations to start 
from their appointed seats. It was an 
evil for which the regular constitution of 
the world had no cure, which nothing but 



275 



the immediate interposition of Providence 
could repair. 

We learn still further, that as the malig- 
nity of sin is so great, and the importance 
of man's conduct so considerable, the dan- 
ger of a life of wilful sin must be much 
more formidable than imagination is apt 
to paint it. The weight of punishment 
naturally due to sin must bear some just 
proportion to its intrinsic malignity, and 
to the extent of the mischiefs which arise 
from it. Its punishment must also bear 
some just proportion to the price which 
has been paid for our redemption. Ter- 
rible must have been the punishment 
which was bought off at so great a price 
as the blood of the Son of God ; and ter- 
rible must be the punishment which still 
awaits us, if " we count the blood of the 
" covenant an unholy thing," and forfeit 
the benefit of that atonement. 

T 2 



276 



Another lesson to be drawn from the 
doctrine of our redemption is, that man, 
notwithstanding his present degeneracy, 
notwithstanding the misery and weakness 
of his present condition, the depravity of 
his passions, and the imbecility of his rea- 
son, hath nevertheless a capacity of high 
improvement in intellect and moral worth. 
For it cannot reasonably be supposed, that 
so much should be done for the deliverance 
of a creature from the consequence of its 
own guilt, of whom it was not understood 
that it had the capacity of being rendered, 
by the discipline applied in some future 
stage at least of its existence, in some de- 
gree worthy of its Maker's care and love. 
The scheme of man's redemption origi- 
nated, we are told, from God's love of 
man. In man, in his fallen state, there is 
nothing which the divine love could 
make its object. But the divine intellect 



277 



contemplates every part of its creation in 
the whole extent of its existence ; and that 
future worth of man, to which he shall be 
raised by the divine mercy, is such as 
moved the divine love to the work of his 
redemption. For, to say that God had 
loved a creature which should be unfit to 
be loved in the whole of its existence, were 
to magnify the mercy of God at the ex- 
pense of his wisdom. 

But, since all improvement of the intel- 
lectual nature must, in some degree, be 
owing to its own exertions to the purpose 
of self-improvement, the prospect of the 
great attainments which the grace of God 
puts 'within our reach, ought to excite us 
to the utmost diligence " to make our 
" calling and election sure as, on the 
other hand, the prospect of the danger 
which threatens the perverse, the careless, 
and the secure, should keep us in a state 

T 3 



278 



of constant watchfulness against the tempt- 
ations of the world, the surprises of pas- 
sion, and the allurements of sense. The 
Christian should remember, that the utmost 
he can do or suffer for himself, by a denial 
of his appetites, and a resistance of tempt- 
ation, or even by exposing himself to the 
scorn and persecution of the world, is far 
less than hath been done and suffered for 
him. And what has he to expect from a 
merciful, but withal a wise and righteous 
Judge, who thinks it hard to mortify those 
passions in himself, for \vhich the Lord of 
life made his life an offering ? 

Whoever thinks without just indignation 
and abhorrence of the Jewish rulers, who, 
in the phrenzy of envy and resentment, — 
envy of our Lord s credit with the people, 
and resentment of his just and affectionate 
rebukes, — spilt his righteous blood ? Let 
us rather turn the edge, of our resentment 



279 

against those enemies which, while they 
are harboured in our own bosoms, " war 
" against our souls," and were, more truly 
than the Jews, the murderers of our Lord. 
Shall the Christian be enamoured of the 
pomp and glory of the world when he con- 
siders, that for the crimes of man's ambi- 
tion the Son of God was humbled ? Shall 
he give himself up to those covetous de- 
sires of the world, which were the occasion 
that his Lord lived an outcast from its 
comforts ? Will the disciples of the holy 
Jesus submit to be the slaves of those base 
appetites of the flesh, which were indeed 
the nails which pierced his Master's hands 
and feet ? Will he, in any situation, be in-, 
timidated by the enmity of the world, or 
abashed by its censures, when he reflects 
how his Lord endured the cross, and de- 
spised the shame ? Hard, no doubt, is the 
conflict which the Christian must sustain 

T 4 



280 



with the power of the enemy, and with 
his own passions. Hard to flesh and blood 
is the conflict ; but powerful is the succour 
given, and high is the reward proposed. 
For thus saith the true and faithful Wit- 
ness, the Original of the creation of God : 
" To him that overcometh will I grant to 
" sit down with me in my throne, even 
" as also I overcame, and am sitten down 
" with my Father in his throne." Now, 
unto Him that loved us, and hath washed 
us from our sins in his own blood ; to Him 
that liveth and was dead, and is alive for 
evermore ; to Him who hath disarmed sin 
of its strength, and death of its sting; to 
the only-begotten Son, with the Father 
and the Holy Ghost, three Persons and 
one only God, be glory and dominion, 
praise and thanksgiving, henceforth and 
for evermore. 



SERMON in. 



Matthew, xx. 23. 

To sit on my right hand and my left is 
" not 7711716 to give, but it shall he given 
" to them for x^hom it is jyreiiared of my 
" Fatherr 

These, you know, were the concluding 
words of our blessed Lord's reply to the 
mother of Zebedee's children, when she 
came with a petition to him for her two 
sons, that they might be the next persons 
to himself in honour and authority in his 
new kingdom, sitting the one on his right 
hand, the other on his left. It was, surely, 



282 



with great truth he told them " they knew 
" not what they asked." At the time 
when their petition was preferred, they 
had, probably, little apprehension what that 
kingdom was to be in which they solicited 
promotion ; and were not at all aware that 
their request went to any thing higher, or 
that it could indeed go to any higher thing 
than the first situations in the king of 
Israel's court. He told them that they 
sought a pre-eminence not easily attained, 
to be earned only by a patient endurance 
of unmerited sufferings for the service of 
mankind and the propagation of the true 
religion ; and he asks them, in enigmatical 
language, whether they were prepared to 
follow his example ? It is of the nature of 
ambition to overlook all difficulties, and to 
submit to any hardships for the attainment 
of its ends. Two miserable fishermen of 
the Galilean lake, raised to the near pro- 



283 



spect, as they thought, of wealth and gran- 
deur, thought no conditions hard by which 
they might become the favourites and 
ministers of a king ; nor perhaps did they 
understand in what extent it was ordained 
that they must suffer, before they could be 
permitted to enjoy. They answered, that 
they were prepared for all difficulties. Our 
blessed Lord, continuing his enigmatical 
language, (for although their ambition was 
to be repressed, it was but too evident that 
their faith was not yet ripened to bear a 
clear prospect of the hardships which they 
had to undergo), tells them, " that they 
" shall drink indeed of his cup, and be 
" baptized with the baptism with which 
" himself should be baptized." Expres- 
sions upon which at the time they would 
probably put some flattering interpretation, 
understanding them only as a general de- 
claration that they were to share their 



284 



Master's fortunes. " But to sit," says he, 
" upon my right hand and my left is not 
" mine to give, but it shall be given to 
" them for whom it is prepared of my 
" Father." 

These last words deserve particular at- 
tention. There can be no question that 
the kingdom of which our Saviour speaks 
is his future kingdom, and " to sit upon 
" his right hand and his left," in the 
sense, which, in his ow^n private thoughts, 
he put upon the words when he used 
them, denotes a situation of distinguished 
happiness and glory in the future life,^ 
This is evident from the means which he 
points out for the attainment of this pro- 
motion. His question to the apostles im- 
plies, that what they ignorantly sought 
was unattainable, except to those only who 
should have the fortitude to drink of Ms 
cup, and to be baptized with his baptism. 



285 



His cup was the cup of suffering ; his bap- 
tism, the baptism of a violent and ignomi- 
nious death. But the only promotion to 
which this cup and this baptism can ever 
lead, must be a situation of glory in the 
life to come. This life is to be thrown 
away in the acquisition. The next, there- 
fore, must necessarily be the season when 
the reversion is to take effect. Our Lord 
therefore speaks of the distinctions of the 
blessed in the future life, when he says, 
that " to sit on his right hand and his left, 
is not his to give, but it shall be given to 
them for whom it is prepared of the 
« Father." 

It must therefore strike every attentive 
reader, that our Lord, in these very re- 
markable words, seems to disclaim all pro- 
perty in the rewards and honours of the 
future life, and all discretionary power in 
the distribution of them. They are not 



286 



mine, he says. Not being mine, I have 
no right to give them away ; and as I have 
no right, so neither have 1 authority for 
the distribution of them : The whole busi- 
ness is indeed ah*eady done : There are 
certain persons for whom these things are 
prepared, and to them, and them only, 
they shall be given. This declaration is 
the more extraordinary, not only as it is 
inconsistent with our general notions of the 
Son of God to suppose that there should 
be any thing not absolutely in his disposal, 
(for all things that the Father hath are his), 
but because it is the clear doctrine of the 
Scriptures, that the general judgment is 
particularly committed to his management ; 
that he is the appointed Judge who is to 
decide upon every man's merit ; and is to 
assign to every individual the particular 
proportion of reward or punishment, hap- 
piness or suffering, glory or shame, that 



287 



may be due to his good or ill deservings 
in the present life. This business is allot- 
ted to the Son, not as peculiarly his in his 
original divine character, like the business 
of creation, but as proper to his assumed 
character of the incarnate God. " The 
" Father judgeth no man, but he hath com- 
" mitted all judgment to the Son." And 
judgment is committed to him for this 
especial reason, that he is the son of man. 
" God hath appointed a day in which he 
" will judge the world by the man whom 
" he hath ordained, even the man Christ 
Jesus." To recite all the texts in which 
the general judgment is described as a 
business in which Christ, as the Christ, 
shall have the whole direction, would be 
an endless task. I shall produce only one 
more : " To him that overcometh will I 
" grant to sit with me in my throne, even 
" as I also overcame, and am sitten down 



288 



" with my Father in his throne." In these 
words our Saviour expressly claims that 
very power which he seems to disclaim in 
the words of my text. 

Much of this difficulty arises from an in- 
accuracy in our English translation. The 
Greek words might be more exactly ren- 
dered thus : " To sit upon my right hand 
" and my left is not mine to give, except 
" to those for whom it hath been prepared 
" of my Father." Our Saviour therefore, 
in these words, disclaims not the authority 
which the holy Scriptures constantly ascribe 
to him, and which, in the epistle to the 
church of Loadicea, in the book of Reve- 
lations, he claims for himself in the most 
peremptory terras. He disdains not the 
authority of making the final distribution 
of reward and punishment, and of appoint- 
ing to situations of distinction in his future 
kingdom. But yet he speaks as if in the 

19 



289 



management of this business he were tied 
down to certain rules prescribed by the 
Ahiiighty Father, from which he would 
not be at hberty to depart. But in this 
manner of speaking there is nothing but 
what is conformable to the usual language 
of Holy Writ. The Son is everywhere 
spoken of as giving effect to the original 
purposes of the paternal mind, by his im- 
mediate action upon the external world, 
with which the Father, otherwise thaa 
through the agency of the Son, holds as it 
-were, no intercourse. Not that the pur- 
poses and counsels of the Father are not 
equally the purposes and counsels of the 
Son, or that the Son acts without original 
authority by a mere delegated power ; but 
that this notion of the Father's purpose 
executed by the Son, is the best idea that 
can be conveyed to the human mind of 
the manner in which God governs his 

V 



29G 



creation. And beyond this it becomes us 
not to be curious to inquire. But upon 
another point we may be permitted to be 
more inquisitive, because it touches our 
interests more nearly. Our Saviour's words 
intimate, that the business of the future 
judgment is ah'eady settled ; that the parti- 
cular situations of the future life are allot- 
ted to particular persons ; and that his 
office, when he shall come to execute judg- 
ment, will only be to see that each indi- 
vidual is put in possession of the office and 
the station, which, by the wise counsels of 
Providence, have been long ago set apart 
for him. " To sit upon my right hand 
" and my left is not mine to give, except 
" to those for whom it is prepared of my 
" Father." It should seem, therefore, that 
the first stations in Christ's future kingdom 
are appropriated to particular persons, who 
must enjoy them. If the first, why not 



291 



the second stations ? If the second, why 
not the third ? And thus it will follow, 
that every station in Christ's future king- 
dom, from the highest to the lowest, is ap- 
propriated ; and, of consequence, that the 
condition of every individual is irresistibly 
determined by a decree, which was passed 
upon him ages before he was brought into 
existence. 

St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans 
has been thought to teach the same doc- 
trine. And if this doctrine were to be 
found clearly asserted in the apostle's writ- 
ings, this discouraging interpretation of our 
Lord's declaration would seem but too cer- 
tain. The fact is, that St. Paul in his 
epistle to the Romans represents the de- 
generacy of mankind as so great in con- 
sequence of the fall, that if God had been 
pleased to make an arbitrary selection of 
certain persons to be admitted to mercy 
u 2 



292 



upon their repentance, and had consigned 
the rest of the race to the natural punish- 
ment of their guilt, the proceeding could 
not have been taxed either with cruelty or 
injustice. But he affirms, that God hath 
actually dealt with mankind in a far milder 
and more equitable way, admitting all 
without exception, who are willing to re- 
pent, to repentance, and all who do repent 
to the benefit of our Lord's atonement ; 
inviting all men to accept the proffered 
mercy ; bearing with repeated provocation 
and affront; and leaving none but the har- 
dened and incorrigible exposed to final 
wrath and punishment. This being the 
true representation of God's dealings with 
mankind, the happiness of the future life 
being open to all men upon the condition 
of faith, repentance, and amendment, the 
degrees of that happiness will unquestion- 
ably be proportioned to the proficiency 



293 



that each man shall have made in the 
emendation of his heart and his manners, 
by the rules of the Gospel. Those, there- 
fore, for whom it is prepared to sit upon 
our Lord's right hand and his left, cannot 
be any certain persons unconditionally pre- 
destined to situations of glory in the life to 
come. 

I say they cannot be any certain persons 
unconditionally predestined after this man- 
ner: John the son of Zebedee to this of- 
fice, James the son of Zebedee to that, 
Peter to a third; whatever the conduct of 
John, James, or Peter, in their apostolical 
ministry in the present life may have been. 
It is certain that God's foreknowledge hath 
from the beginning extended, not only to 
the minutest actions of the life of every 
man who ever was to live, but even to the 
most secret motives from which each man's 
actions were to spring ; to his thoughts, his 

u 3 - 



294 



wishes, his fears, his likings and aversions. 
God, therefore, had from all eternity as ex- 
act a knowledge of every man's character, 
as true an estimation of his good or ill 
deserts, as can be had when the man shall 
have lived to finish the career of virtue or 
of vice which God hath ever foreseen that 
he would run. This foreknowledge of 
every man's character, cannot but be ac- 
companied with a foreknowledge o^^ the 
particular lot of happiness or misery which 
it will be fit he should receive. And since 
to perceive what is fit, and to resolve that 
what is fit shall be, must be one act, or if 
not absolutely one, they must be insepar- 
able acts in the Divine mind, it should 
seem indeed that every man's final doom, 
in consequence of an exact view of his 
future life, must have been eternally deter- 
mined. But this is only to say, that the 
world, with its whole consequence of 



295 



events, has ever been present to the Crea- 
tor's mind. And however difficult the 
thing may be for the human apprehension, 
this predetermination of all things, which 
is implied in this idea of the Divine om- 
niscience, leaves men no less morally free, 
and makes their future doom no less subject 
to the contingency of their own actions, than 
if nothing were foreseen, nothing decreed 
in consequence of foreknowledge. The 
foreknowledge of an action, and the pur- 
pose of reward or punishment arising from 
that foreknowledge, being no more a cause 
of the action to which reward or punish- 
ment will be due, than the knowledge of 
any past action, and the resolution of cer- 
tain measures to be taken in consequence 
of it, are causes of the action which give 
rise to the resolution ; the knowledge of a 
fact, whether the thing known be past or 
future, being quite a distinct thing fiom 

u 4 



296 



the causes that produce it Neither the 
foreknowledge therefore of the Deity, 
though perfect and infalHble, nor any pre- 
destination of individuals to happiness or 
misery, which may necessarily result from 
that foreknowledge, hdwever unaccount- 
able the thing may seem, is any impedi- 
ment to human liberty ; nor is any man's 
doom decreed, unless it be upon a fore- 
sight of his life and character. Nor is it 
prepared for Peter and Paul to sit upon 
Christ's right hand and his left, in prefer- 
ence to John or James, who may be more 
deserving. It is no such arbitrary arrange- 
ment, which our Lord disclaims any dis- 
cretionary power to put by. The irrever- 
sible arrangement, which he alleges as a bar 
against any partial operation of his own 
particular affections, is an arrangement 
founded on the eternal maxims of justice, 
in favour, not of certain persons, but of 



297 



persons of a certain character and descrip- 
tion ; of persons who will be found distin- 
guished by particular attainments of holi- 
ness, by the fruits of a true and lively faith, 
by an extraordinary proficiency in the 
habits of true piety, charity, and temper- 
ance. His declaration is no renunciation 
of his property in the rewards to be be- 
stowed, or of his authority for the distri- 
bution of them ; but it is a very forcible 
and striking declaration of the absolute im- 
artiality with which the business of the 
kt judgment will be conducted. The 
^n of God, when he assumed our mortal 
niure, became so truly man, that we may 
beillowed to say, that he formed, like other 
me, his particular friendships and attach- 
me.s ; as appeared strongly in the case 
of lizarus, and in some other instances. 
Onef the brothers for whom the request 
was lade which occasioned the declaration 



298 



in my text, was his favourite disciple in 
such a degree, as to excite the envy of the 
rest. But he tells them, that in the distri- 
bution of the glories of his future kingdom, 
no private feelings which may belong to 
him as a man will be allowed to operate. 
That justice, the Creator's justice, tempered 
indeed with mercy, with general and 
equitable mercy, but unbribed by favour 
and affection, will hold its firm and even 
course. So that every man will be placed 
in the situation to which his comparative 
merit shall entitle him, without any prefei 
ence in favour even of those who we* 
chosen by our Lord to be his earliest asr 
ciates and his most familiar friends. 1e 
lesson to be drawn from this explicit decr- 
ation of our Lor4 is, the necessity of ai^c- 
tual repentance on the one hand, andhe 
certainty of acceptance on the other, ithis 
necessary work is once accomplhed. 

-I 



299 



Our Lord's declaration that every man will 
at last find himself in the station which 
eternal justice has ordained that he shall 
hold, cuts off all hope but what is founded 
on an active and sincere repentance ; on 
such a repentance as may entitle to the 
benefit of the Redeemer's expiation, which 
is ever to be kept in view; for, without 
that, our Saviour's declaration would ren- 
der every man altogether hopeless. On 
the other hand, this declaration holds out 
to the sincere penitent the most animating 
hope. If the highest stations in the future 
life are reserved for the apostles, it is be- 
cause the apostles will be found to have 
excelled all other Christians in the love of 
God and the duties of the Christian life. 
Should two persons appear at the great 
judgment more worthy than the sons of 
Zebedee to sit upon Christ's right hand 
and his left, (the supposition is, perhaps5 



300 



extravagant, and, otherwise than as a mere 
supposition to illustrate a point of doctrine, 
it is unwarrantable ;) should two such per- 
sons appear, the sons of Zebedee will not 
be permitted to take place of them. Such 
being the equity with which the future re- 
tribution will be administered, there is evi- 
dently no hope for sinners but in a true 
repentance, and for a true repentance there 
will be no disappointment in its glorious 
hope. Nor let any one be discouraged 
from the work of repentance by any enor- 
mities of his past life. Confirmed habits 
of sin heighten the difficulty of repentance ; 
but such are the riches of God's mercy, 
that they exclude not from the benefits of 
it. This our Lord was pleased to testify 
in the choice that he made of his first asso- 
ciates, who, with the exception perhaps of 
two or three who had been previously 
tutored in the Baptist's school, had been 



301 



persons of irregular irreligious lives ; and 
yet these we know are they who hereafter 
shall be seated on twelve thrones judging 
the twelve tribes of Israel. " Be ye zealous 
" therefore and repent " for so an en- 
" trance shall be ministered unto you 
^' abundantly into the everlasting kingdom 
" of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." 



SERMON IV. 



Ephesians, iv. 30. 

" And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, 
" whereby ye are sealed unto the day of 
" redemption^ 

A SEAL has been in use from the earliest 
antiquity, to authenticate writings of im- 
portance, both in public and private trans- 
actions. When the prophet Jeremiah pur- 
chased, by God's command, his uncle Ha- 
naneel's estate, the conveyance of the pro- 
perty was by deeds that were signed and 
sealed ; and the letters which Jezebel 
issued for Naboth's destruction were sealed 



303 



with Ahab's seal. In allusion to this prac- 
tice whatever may seem to justify a claim 
to any particular privilege, commission, 
or authority, or to afford a confirmation of 
a promise that is hereafter to take effect, 
is, by an easy figure, called a seal. Thus, 
St. Paul calls the Corinthian church the 
seal of his apostleship ; " The seal of mine 
" apostleship are ye in the Lord." The 
blessing of God which crowned my labours 
among you with such success, as to reclaim 
you from the idolatry and the debaucheries 
to which idolaters are addicted, is a certain 
evidence that God sent me to perform that 
work which his providence hath brought 
to so happy an effect. By the same figure 
he calls circumcision the seal of Abraham's 
righteousness of faith. It was the ap- 
pointed mark, and standing memorial of the 
promises which were made to Abraham, 
in consideration of that righteousness of 



304 



faitli which Abraham had exercised before 
those promises were given, or this rite was 
appointed. It was an evidence of the ac- 
ceptance of this righteousness in the person 
of Abraham ; and, by consequence, since 
there can be no respect of persons with the 
all-righteous God, since the qualities that 
he accepted in Abraham he must equally 
accept in every other person in whom they 
may be equally conspicuous, this seal of 
Abraham's righteousness was a general seal 
of the righteousness of faith. It was an 
evidence to every one who should in after- 
times become acquainted with the patri- 
arch's history, that righteousness would be 
imputed to all who should walk in the 
steps of Abraham's faith, which he had 
being uncircumcised. And again, by the 
same figure, the apostle in the text calls 
the gifts and graces of the Holy Ghost the 
seal of the Christian's hopes : " Grieve not 



305 



the Holy Spirit of God, by whom ye are 
" sealed to the day of redemption." The 
same image occurs frequently in his writ- 
ings. Thus in the first chapter of this 
same epistle he says, " In whom," i. e. in 
Christ, " having believed, ye have been 
" sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise." 
And in the second to the Corinthians, " It 
" is God that hath sealed us, and given the 

earnest of his Spirit in our hearts." 

In all these passages, the seal of the Holy 
Spirit is to be understood of those gifts and 
graces, which the Scriptures teach us to 
ascribe to his immediate operation. And 
taken in the utmost latitude, as including 
both the miraculous gifts which were pecu- 
liar to the primitive ages, and the general 
sanctifying influence on the heart of every 
true believer, the Spirit may, on various ac- 
counts, be justly called the seal of our final 
redemption ; inasmuch as it is that which 

X 



306 



gives the utmost certainty to our hopes of 
future bliss and glory, which any thing 
antecedent to the actual possession can 
afford. 

In the first place, the visible descent of 
the Holy Spirit on the first Christians, and 
the extraordinary powers which they dis- 
played in consequence of it, were the pro- 
per seal of the general truth of Christianity. 
These gifts had been predicted by the ear- 
liest prophets as a part of the blessings of 
the Messiah's reign, to be enjoyed under 
the covenant which he should establish. 
" It shall come to pass," says Joel, " that 
" I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh ; 
" and your sons and your daughters shall 
" prophesy, your . old men shall dream 
" dreams, your young men shall see vi- 
" sions ; and also upon the servants and 
" upon the handmaids in those days will 
" I pour out my Spirit." John the Baptist, 



307 



when he declared himself to be the pro- 
mised forerunner of the Messiah, and an- 
nounced his speedy advent, places the 
great superiority of his character and 
office in this circumstance, — that he should 
fulfil these ancient predictions by baptizing 
his disciples with the fire of the Holy 
Ghost. Alluding, as I conceive, in that 
expression, both to the active nature of 
that holy principle which the Christian 
baptism conveys into the converted heart, 
and to the form in which the Almighty 
Spirit made his visible descent upon the 
first Christians. Christ himself promised 
his disciples, that " when he should leave 
" them to return to the Father, he would 
" send them another Comforter to abide 
" with them for ever ; even the spirit of 
" truth, who should lead them into all 
" truth give them just views of that 
scheme of mercy which they were to pub- 
X 2 



308 



lisii to the world ; a right understanding of 
the ancient prophecies ; a discernment of 
their true completion in the person of 
Christ, and the establishment of his reli- 
gion ; bring all things to their remembrance 
which Christ had told them ; and supply 
them, without previous study or medit- 
ation of their own, with a ready and com- 
manding eloquence, when they should be 
called to make the apology of the Christ- 
ian faith before kings and rillers. But 
this Comforter, he told them, could not 
come before his own departure j and this 
was agreeable to ancient prophecy. David, 
in the sixty-eighth psalm, predicting, ac- 
cording to St. Paul's interpretation of the 
passage, these miraculous gifts of the Spirit, 
speaks of them as subsequent to the Mes- 
siah's ascension : " Thou hast ascended 
on high, thou hast led captivity captive, 
" thou hast received gifts for men." What 

19 



309 



these gifts should be, is declared in the con- 
clusion of the verse, — " that the Lord God 
" may dwell among them." This dwelling 
of God must signify something more than 
God's residence in the Jewish sanctuary ; 
for whatever might be in the mind of the 
prophet, the prophetic spirit looked for- 
ward to later times. It cannot signify the 
Son's dwelling among men, when he came 
to preach the doctrine of life, and to pay 
the forfeit of their crimes, because it is de- 
scribed as subsequent to his ascension. It 
can signify, therefore, no other dwelling of 
God, than the residence of the Holy Spirit 
in the Christian church. I must not pass 
over this passage of the Psalmist without 
remarking, that the original word which is 
rendered Lord is JaJi^ one of the proper 
names of God, of the same etymology and 
import with the name Jehovah ; of which 
indeed some have thought it only an ab- 
X 3 



310 



breviation. I have upon former occasions 
explained to you, that the name Jehovah 
is in various passages of the holy prophets 
applied to the Messiah. You have here 
an instance of a name of the same kind 
equally proper to the Deity, applied to 
the Holy Spirit, provided we are right in 
the application of this last clause to him. 
Concerning the former part, " the ascend- 
" ing on high, and the receiving of gifts for 
" men," there can be no doubt. We have 
the apostle's authority for applying it to 
Christ's ascension, and the gifts afterwards 
imparted by the Spirit. The application 
of the concluding clause I confess is not 
equally certain, because it makes no part 
of the apostle's quotation ; and the great 
obscurity of the grammatical construction 
in the original throws something of uncer- 
tainty upon the meaning. In the sense 
which our English translators have ex- 



311 



pressed, the words evidently respect the 
Holy Spirit. And in this sense the Jews 
of the second century seem to have ac- 
quiesced. * These predictions of the ancient 
prophets and the Baptist, and these pro- 
mises of our Lord, were largely and exactly 
verified in the event. After frequent ap- 
pearances to his disciples, within the space 
of forty days after his resurrection, Jesus 
took a solemn leave, and ascended on high 
as David had foretold, having commanded 
the apostles to " wait in Jerusalem for the 
" promise of the Father." They were not 
disobedient to our Lord's injunction ; and 
their waiting was not long, nor was it fruit- 



* For the words were rendered to the same effect 
Aquila. Honbigant, upon the authority of the Syriac, pro- 
poses a violent alteration of the present reading, for which 
however I find no authority in Dr. Kennicot's Collection of 
Various Readings. 

X 4 



312 



less. For when the day of Pentecost was 
come, that is, the fiftieth day from the fes- 
tival of the Passover on which our Lord 
had suffered, and by consequence the 
eighth or ninth only after his ascension, 
the apostles being assembled, suddenly the 
sound of a blast rushing with violence 
through the air filled the house where they 
were sitting. The sound was immediately 
succeeded by the appearance of parted 
tongues of fire, (fire from the first institu- 
tion of the law, if not indeed from earlier 
ages, had been the peculiar symbol of 
God's immediate presence), settling upon 
each of them. The immediate effect was 
what our Saviour had foretold ; and more 
indeed than might at first appear in the 
words in which his promise had upon any 
occasion been conveyed. He had pro- 
mised them a ready utterance in the de- 
fence of the Christian doctrine : But they 



313 



find themselves suddenly endued with the 
power of utterance in a variety of lan- 
guages which they had never learned. 
Jerusalem was at this time, as it always 
was during the festivals of the Passover 
and the Pentecost, crowded with strangers 
from every quarter of the world. The 
sacred historian mentions by name not 
fewer than fifteen countries, of which the 
natives with astonishment confessed that 
they heard the wonders of God declared, 
each in the proper language of the coun- 
try where he had been born. The testi- 
mony of these impartial foreigners was a 
sufficient confutation of that base insinu- 
ation,— that the speakers were filled with 
new wine. This seems indeed to have 
been the illiberal surmise of the meanest 
only of the rabble of Jerusalem, who, un- 
derstanding none of the languages in which 
the apostles spake, imagined that they 



314 

were uttering a jargon, and that the whole 
transaction was either an imposture, or, as 
they rather believed, a drunken frolic. But 
we have the testimony of those who were 
the only competent judges of the fact, that 
nothing of the levity or incoherence of 
drunkenness appeared either in the matter 
or the manner of these extraordinary dis- 
courses. The matter was the wonderful 
works of God, the great mystery of godli- 
ness displayed in man's redemption. And 
upon this abstruse and weighty subject 
each speaker delivered himself with per- 
spicuity and propriety in the language 
that he used ; though this was probably 
the first occasion in his life on which he 
had either used it himself or heard it spo- 
ken. For of the fifteen languages which 
the sacred text enumerates, many, I be- 
lieve I might have said the greater part, 
were as little known in Judea in the time 



315 



of the apostles, as the languages of China 
and Japan are at this day in Europe. Our 
Saviour had also promised, that the Holy 
Spirit should lead his disciples into all 
truth: Accordingly, the immediate illumin- 
ation of the understanding upon his visi- 
ble descent, was not less remarkable than 
the new powers of elocution. To the very 
last moment of our Lord's continuance on 
earth, the apostles cherished the fond ex- 
pectation of a temporal kingdom to be 
immediately established : " Lord, wilt thou 
" at this time restore the kingdom to 
" Israel ?" was the last question that they 
asked just before Christ ascended. After 
the descent of the Holy Spirit, we find no 
traces of this prejudice remaining. The 
charge of intoxication drew from St. Peter 
an apology, very remarkable for the brevity 
and the perspicuous arrangement of the 
unstudied argument, as well as for the 



316 



commanding strain of manly rhetoric in 
which it is conveyed. In this speech the 
apostle discovers a clear insight into the 
sense of prophecies which, till this hour, it is 
certain he had never understood. He insists 
on the spiritual nature of the kingdom to 
which he now understands his Lord to be 
exalted at God's right hand ; he proves it 
by prophetic passages of the Psalms ; and 
he insists upon the present miracle as an 
instance of his power. " Being exalted," 
says he, " to the right hand of God, and 
having received the promised Holy Spirit 
" from the Father, he has poured out that 
" which ye now see and hear." I would 
remark by the way, that these last words, 
" ye see and hear," deserve attention. 
Something extraordinary, it seems, was 
publicly seen, as well as heard, by the mul- 
titude upon this occasion. But we read of 
nothing that was visible but the appearance 



311 



of the fiery tongues. This appearance, 
therefore, was not a private one, confined 
to the chamber where the apostles were 
sitting when the Holy Spirit came upon 
them ; but it continued visible on the head 
of each, when they came abroad to speak 
to the multitude. So that the appearance 
of this glorious light, the token of God's 
immediate presence, no less than the con- 
sistence and propriety of the discourses 
that were delivered, refuted the base charge 
of intoxication. 

Thus the visible descent of the Holy 
Ghost upon the day of Pentecost, as it was 
a completion of the earliest prophecies, 
and a verification of the Baptist's predic- 
tion, and of our Saviour's promises, is a 
seal of the general truth of the Christian 
doctrine. And as the private hopes of 
every Christian depend upon the general 
truth of the revelation, the Holy Spirit 



318 



thus sealing the doctrine, in some sense 
" seals every true behever to the day of 
" redemption." 

But again, — This visible descent of the 
Holy Spirit v^as in itself, without any refer- 
ence to former prophecies and promises, 
a seal of the general truth of Christianity, 
as it v^as a token of the merit of Christ's 
atonement, and the efficacy of his inter- 
cession with the Father, " the Author of 
" every good and perfect gift." " I will 
" pray the Father," said Jesus to his disci- 
ples, " and he shall give you another Com- 
" forter," The coming of that other Com- 
forter is a certain argument that Christ's 
intercession has prevailed, and a sure 
ground of hope that it shall equally pre- 
vail for all the purposes for which it shall 
be exerted. Again, — If we consider the 
Comforter as sent immediately to the 
church by Christ himself, which is the 



319 



Scripture doctrine, his visible descent was 
an instance of that power which Christ 
exercises at the right hand of God, for the 
welfare and preservation of his church. 
In this light, therefore, as a token of the 
Father's acceptance of Christ's atonement, 
and of the power exercised by Christ in 
his exalted state, the visible descent of the 
Holy Ghost was a seal of the Christian 
doctrine. And the hope of every believer 
being built on the acceptance of that meri- 
torious sacrifice, and on Christ's power to 
raise the dead bodies of his servants from 
the grave, and transform them to the like- 
ness of his own ; whatever is, in the nature 
of the thing, a certain sign of Almighty 
power exercised by Christ, and of the 
merit of his sacrifice, is a seal of every 
believer's hope of his own final redemp- 
tion. 



320 



As the visible descent of the Holy Ghost, 
and the powers which were conveyed by 
it to the first Christians, made the proper 
seal of the Christian doctrine, so the power 
of imparting these extraordinary endow- 
ments, in certain due proportions to other 
Christians, was the seal of the apostolical 
office and authority. That the apostles 
were exclusively possessed of this extraor- 
dinary privilege, is evident from the history 
of the first converts of Samaria. The 
Gospel was preached to them by Philip 
the deacon, who baptized his converts 5f 
both sexes. And when the apostles, who 
as yet resided at Jerusalem, heard of 
Philip's success in Samaria, they sent 
thither Peter and John, who seem to have 
been deputed for the express purpose of 
communicating the miraculous gifts of the 
Spirit. For, when they were come down, 
they prayed for them, "that they might 



321 



" receive the Holy Ghost : For as yet he 
" was fallen upon none of them." And after 
these prayers the two apostles " laid their 
" hands upon them, and they received the 
« Holy Ghost." That the gifts conveyed 
to these Samaritan converts, by the impo- 
sition of the hands of the apostles, were of 
the miraculous kind, is evident, in the Jirst 
place, from this general consideration, that 
the persons who received these gifts had 
already been baptized by Philip ; and the 
ordinary gifts of the Spirit, those moral 
influences by which every believer must be 
regenerated in order to his being saved, are 
conferred in baptism. The same thing is 
further evident from the particulars of the 
story. Simon the sorcerer was of the num- 
ber of Philip's converts : " When Simon 
" saw that the Holy Spirit was given by 
" the imposition of the apostles' hands, he 
" offered them money, saying, Give me 



322 

" also this power, that on whomsoever I 
" may lay my hands, he may receive the 
" Holy Ghost." It is evident, that the 
Holy Ghost, which was given upon this 
occasion by the apostles, was some sensible 
gift of a very extraordinary and notorious 
kind, which Simon saw; and he vainly 
and impiously imagined, that the power 
of conferring it might be of great use to 
him in carrying on his trade of magical 
delusion. The power, therefore, of impart- 
ing these miraculous gifts, was the peculiar 
seal of the apostolical office, -and some 
share of them seems to have been the con- 
stant effect of the imposition of their hands. 
The gift that seems to have been the most 
generally bestowed is that of tongues. For 
when St. Paul laid his hands upon the 
Ephesian converts of ApoUos, the effect 
was, that the Holy Ghost came upon them 
in his sensible operations, and they " spake 



323 



with tongues and prophesied that is, 
they celebrated the praises of God and of 
Christ. And, in the first epistle to the 
Corinthians, the apostle, making a distinct 
and orderly enumeration of the miraculous 
gifts, places that of tongues last, as among 
great things the least considerable. Indeed, 
it appears from that epistle, that it was 
possessed and exercised by many in the 
Corinthian church, who had little discre- 
tion in the use of it. This, therefore, seems 
to have been of the extraordinary gifts the 
most common. And the conceit of some 
learned men, who have imagined that this 
gift was not one of the standing powers 
of the primitive church in the apostolic 
age, but a particular miracle that accom- 
panied the first descent of the Holy Ghost 
upon the day of Pentecost, and his subse- 
quent descent on the family of Cornelius, 
the first Gentile convert ; and that it was 

Y 2 



324 



never heard of but in these two instances ; 
this conceit of some learned men, who lived 
about the beginning of the Reformation, is 
vain, and destitute of all foundation. But 
to return : — The Holy Spirit, by the power 
with which he invested the apostles of 
communicating his extraordinary gifts to 
their converts in due proportion, according 
to the exigencies of the church and the 
merits of the persons on whom their hands 
were laid, sealed their authority. And as 
the true believer's hopes rest on the autho- 
rity of the apostles to preach Christ's reli- 
gion, the Holy Spirit thus sealing their 
authority, seals all those who embrace and 
practise the faith they taught " to the day 
" of redemption." 

The miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit 
were also a visible mark of God's accept- 
ance of the Gentile converts, and a parti- 



325 



cular seal of them " to the day of redemp- 
«tion." 

But the seal of which the apostle speaks 
in my text I rather take to be the ordinary 
influence of the Holy Ghost than any or 
all of the miraculous endowments. This 
may be inferred with certainty from the 
parallel passage in the second epistle to 
the Corinthians, where he says, that God 
has sealed us, by " giving the earnest of 
" the Spirit in our hearts." Many of the 
passions of the mind, — anger, fear, joy, 
grief, surprise, and others,' — when they 
rise to any considerable height, have a 
sensible effect on the motion of the blood, 
to accelerate or retard its circulation, to 
collect and confine it in the heart, or to 
drive it to the external surface of the body. 
Hence the effect of these passions on the 
body is particularly felt in the region of 
the heart, which was therefore the part first 
Y 3 



326 



thought of for the seat of the soul. After- 
wards when men came to understand that 
the brain is the immediate organ of sensa- 
tion, they refined, and allotted distinct 
seats'* to the understanding, the manly- 
passions, and the appetites ; placing the 
first in the brain, the second in the heart, 
and the last in the liver. Hence in all 
languages, and with all writers sacred and 
profane, the heart is used figuratively to 
denote the moral qualities and dispositions 
of the mind. And this expression, " the 
" Holy Spirit in our hearts," can signify 
no other thing than his ordinary influences 
on these moral qualities and dispositions 
in every true believer. These influences, 
the Apostle asserts, are to every Christian 
the seal of his redemption. And this. 



* Plato in the Timgeus, 



327 



which is the doctrine most immediately 
arising from my text, I purpose hereafter 
to discuss : Imploring the assistance of 
that Spirit who is with the faithful to the 
end of the world, to give me the power to 
declare, and you to apprehend, this great 
and interesting, but difficult and mysterious 
branch of the doctrine of redemption. 



t 4 



SERMON V. 



Ephesians, iv. 30. 

" And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, 
" KDhereby ye are sealed unto the day of 
" redemption,^^ 

In my last discourse upon these words 
of the Apostle, I told you, that the seal of 
the Spirit, in this and all other passages 
where the same image may occur, is to be 
understood of those gifts and graces which 
the Scriptures teach us to ascribe to the 
immediate operation of the Holy Spirit of 
God. And taking the expression in its 
most extensive meaning, as comprehend- 



329 



ing the miraculous, as well as what are 
called the ordinary influences, I showed 
you, that those miraculous powers which 
subsisted in the primitive ages, may with 
great propriety be esteemed a seal of every 
private Christian's hope ; inasmuch as 
they were the seal of the general truth of 
the Christian doctrine ; the seal of Christ's 
power ; the seal of the efficacy of his in- 
tercession, and the merit of his sacrifice ; 
the seal of the authority of the apostles to 
establish that new religion, by the terms 
of which we hope for mercy j and the seal 
of the acceptance of the Gentile converts, 
who enjoyed their share of these extraor- 
dinary endowments, so long as they sub- 
sisted at all in the Christian church. 

I come now to treat a doctrine which, 
if I mistake not, is a source of greater and 
more general comfort, and is the doctrine 
more immediately arising from the text, 



330 



that the ordinary influences of the Holy 
Spirit on the mind of every true believer, 
are to every individual of that description 
a particular seal of his personal interest in 
the glorious promises of the Gospel : — a 
doctrine full of the truest consolation and 
the highest joy, but very liable to be mis- 
understood. Great difficulties have indeed 
been raised in it, by those who have un- 
skilfully maintained, and those who have 
rashly denied it. It is to be treated, there- 
fore, with accuracy and caution ; and we 
must rely on the assistance of that Spirit 
who, we trust, is in this and in all ages 
with the faithful teacher and diligent 
hearer of the word, to conduct us to the 
truth in this important but difficult dis- 
quisition. 

The proposition which we apprehend 
to be implied in the text, and which is in- 
culcated in innumerable passages of Holy 



331 



Writ, is this, that the ordinary influences 
of the Holy Spirit on the heart of every 
true believer, are to every such person an 
earnest of his final salvation. These in- 
fluences are an immediate action of the 
Holy Spirit of God upon the mind of man, 
by which he is brought to will, and enabled 
to do according to God's pleasure; to 
master the importunity of appetite; to 
curb the impetuosity of passion ; to resist 
the temptations of the world ; to baffle 
the wiles of the devil ; to deny himself ; 
to. take up his cross, and follow his cruci- 
fied Lord through the straight and thorny 
paths of virtue, to the peaceful seats of 
endless bliss and glory. It is the doctrine 
of the Scriptures, that a strength conveyed 
from God into the Christian's mind, renders 
him sufficient for these great performances. 
And the text, assuming this doctrine as a 
confessed and certain truth, teaches him to 



332 



conclude, that God's enabling him to do 
what, without God's assistance, could not 
be done, is a certain argument of God's 
merciful design to promote him to that 
happiness hereafter, for v/hich the habits 
of a religious temper here are the natural 
preparative. And admitting the premises, 
the conclusion seems obvious and inevit- 
able. It was wisely said by the philoso- 
phers of old, that Nature does nothing in 
vain. It was said wisely, because the whole 
of nature is conducted by the continual 
Providence of the Being who created it. 
In what are called the operations of nature, 
God is the first and sovereign agent. And 
a wise being cannot act but to some end ; 
nor can it be but that infinite power must 
attain the ends to which it is exerted. 
The maxim, therefore, that Nature never 
acts in vain, is true ; but the truth of it rests 
upon the wisdom and power of God, who 



333 



made and governs nature. And it is im- 
properly alleged as itself a first principle 
of science, of original and intrinsic evi- 
dence, since it is only a consequence from 
a higher and more general principle, " that 
" God never acts in vain." This principle 
obtains universally in the moral no less 
than the material world. No act of the 
Deity can be without an end : And when 
God enables the believer to become that 
character which shall be the object of his 
mercy in a future life, the only end to 
which this action can be directed is, to 
bring the person on whom it is performed 
to that state of future happiness in which 
this character fits him to be placed. So 
that if the principle be true, that without 
a constant action of God's Spirit on the 
mind of man no man can persevere in a 
life of virtue and religion, the Christian 
who finds himself empowered to lead this 



334 



life cannot err in his conclusion, that God's 
power is at present exerted upon himself 
in his own person for his final preserva- 
tion. 

But here it may reasonably be asked, 
by what sensible evidence any private 
Christian may be assured that he is himself 
a sharer in these sanctifying influences of 
the Spirit ? For when they are mentioned 
as the seal of his future hopes, there seems 
to be an appeal to something, of which 
there is a sensible perception as an evi- 
dence of the reality of those things which 
are not yet become the objects of percep- 
tion and sense. As the seal affixed to a 
declaratory deed is a sensible mark and 
token of the internal purposes and invisible 
resolutions of the human mind, the sen- 
sible evidence of the action of God's Spirit 
on his own the Christian must look for in 
the integrity of his own principles and the 



S35 



innocence of his life. It may be said of 
the Holy Spirit what Christ has said of 
other spirits, " by his fruits ye shall know 
« him." " The fruit of the Spirit is love 
Love of God, from a just sense of his per- 
fections, which render him no less the ob- 
ject of rational love than of holy fear ; love 
of man, as created in the image of God ; 
a more especial love of Christians, as bre- 
thren and members of Christ. "Joy:" 
A mind untroubled and serene amidst all 
the discouragements and vexations of the 
world ; a full satisfaction and entire com- 
placency in the ability of a holy life. 
" Peace :" A disposition and endeavour 
to live peaceably with all men, not only 
by avoiding what might justly provoke 
their enmity and ill-will, but by a studious 
cultivation of the friendship of mankind 
by all means which may be consistent with 
the purity of our own conduct, and with 



336 



the interests of that religion which we are 
called upon at all hazards to profess and 
to maintain. " Long-suffering :" A pa- 
tient endurance of the evil qualities and 
evil practices of men, even when they 
create particular disturbance and molesta- 
tion to ourselves, founded on an equitable 
attention to that natural infirmity and cor- 
ruption from which none of us are entirely 
exempted ; a temper more inclined to bear 
than to retaliate much unprovoked injury 
and undeserved reproach, esteeming in- 
jury and reproach a lighter evil of the two 
than the restless spirit of contention and 
revenge. " Gentleness, goodness, 
"faith, meekness, temperance:" 
These are the fruits by which the Spirit of 
God is known. But every man's own 
conscience must decide whether these 
fruits are ripened to any perfection in his 
heart ; whether these are the ruling prin- 



337 



ciples of his conduct. If his conscience is 
void of offence towards God and towards 
man : If he makes it the business of this 
life to prepare for his future existence : If 
he uses the present world without abusing 
it : If he is patient in affliction, not elated 
m prosperity ; mild in power, content in 
servitude ; liberal in wealth, honest in po- 
verty; fervent in devotion, temperate in 
pleasure: If he rates not the present world 
above its real worth, and sets his chief 
affection on eternity : — This propriety of 
conduct in the various situations of life ; 
this holy habit of the soul, turning from the 
things that are seen, and looking forward 
to the things invisible, is the undoubted 
work of God's Holy Spirit. It is therefore 
an instance of mercy extended in the pre- 
sent life to the person on whom the effect 
is wrought, and the surest earnest of the 
greater mercies promised in the life to 



338 



come. For God being immutable in his 
natm-e and his attributes, and uniform in 
the methods of his government, the expe- 
rience of his present goodness is the firmest 
ground of future hope. But of the reality 
of that improved state of sentiment and 
manners from which the merciful interpo- 
sition of God's Spirit is inferred, every 
man's own spirit, that is, his conscience, 
is the judge ; and the judgment of con- 
science must be taken from the sensible 
effects of godly dispositions and a holy 
life. 

But is this all ? Is the believer's assur- 
ance of his sanctification nothing more at 
last than an inference of his own mind 
from the favourable testimony of his con- 
science? This is indeed the case. Yet 
this assurance is no inconsiderable thing ; 
for the inference is certain and infallible. 

Beloved,^' says St. John, " if our hearts 



339 



condemn us not, then have we confidence 
" towards God." And the rule by which 
the heart must judge is this : " He that 
" practiseth righteousness is righteous, in 
" hke manner as he, that is, as Christ is 
" righteous." And " every one that prac- 
" tiseth righteousness is born of him." And 
to the same purpose our Lord himself: 
" If any one love me, he will keep my 
" word : And the Father will love him ; 
" and we will come unto him, and make 
" our abode with him." Thus you see, he 
that keeps Christ's commandments is in 
the love of Christ and of the Father : He 
that doeth righteousness is born of God : 
He that is absolved by his conscience 
may be confident God absolves him. And 
yet St. Paul assures us, that he " who has 
" not the spirit of Christ is none of his." 
And St. John, that the evidence that we 
are in his love and under the protection of 
z 2 



340 



his providence is, " that he has given ns 
" of his own Spirit." In these texts the 
very same things are denied of him who 
shall be without the Spirit, which, in those 
before alleged, are affirmed of him whose 
conscience shall be pure. Evidently, there- 
fore, the connection is necessary and con- 
stant between a good life and a regenerate 
mind ; and where there is a conscience void 
of offence, there is the sanctifying Spirit of 
the Lord. 

Many, it is true, pretend to something 
more than this, and speak of the action of 
the Holy Ghost upon their minds as some- 
thing of which they have an immediate and 
distinct perception independent of the tes- 
timony of conscience ; and they describe it 
as something that they know by what they 
feel to be the internal operation of the 
Spirit. This is indeed a bewitching doc- 
trine, which may easily steal upon the un- 

9 



341 



wary, upon men of a sanguine temper and 
a weak judgment, because it seems to open' 
a new source of comfort. But this per- 
suasion is not of Him that calleth us. It 
is visionary and vain. We have the ex- 
press declaration of Him who alone has a 
perfect understanding of man's nature and 
of God's, and who alone therefore under- 
stands the manner in which the divine 
Spirit acts on man's ; — we have the express 
declaration of Him who sends the Spirit 
into the hearts of his disciples, that its 
operation is no otherwise to be perceived 
than in its effects. He compares it to the 
cause of those currents of the atmosphere 
of which the effects are manifest and noto- 
rious, though the first efficient is what na 
sense discerns, and the manner of its oper- 
ation what no philosophy can explain : 
" The wind bloweth where it listeth, and 
" thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst 

z 3 



342 



" not tell whence it cometh, or whither it 
" goeth. So is every one that is born of 
the Spirit." 

Those who, unmindful of this declaration 
of pur Lord, stand for a perception of the 
Spirit independent of conscience, it is to be 
supposed are little aware that no greater 
certainty of the Spirit's operation would 
arise from the feelings they describe, were 
it real, than conscience may afford without 
it. For of the reality of this feeling, could 
we suppose it real, conscience still must 
be the judge, because conscience is the 
seat of all internal perception. Conscience 
is the faculty whereby the mind, in every 
moment of its existence, perceives itself, 
with every thing that either naturally be- 
longs, or for the present time is incident 
to its being and condition ; its present 
thoughts, its present designs, its present 
hopes, fears, likings, and aversions. Of 



343 



these or any other circumstances of its pre- 
sent state; of any thing itself may do, or 
of any thing which may be done to it, the 
mind can have no feeling but by this 
faculty. Whatever may excite or impress 
the feeling, conscience is the place, if the 
expression may be allowed, where it must 
be felt. A perception, therefore, of the 
mind of any thing done to itself, distinct 
from the perceptions of the conscience, is 
no less an absurdity, in the very first con- 
ception, than an object that should be seen 
without meeting the eye, or a sound that 
should be heard without striking on the 
ear. It is something to be internally per^ 
ceived otherwise than by the faculty of in- 
ternal perception. And it is in vain to 
allege God's power for the production of 
such feelings, because no power can effect 
impossibilities. If, therefore, that internal 
feeling to which enthusiasts pretend, were 

z 4 



344 



real, it would indeed be a new matter of 
employment for the conscience; but it 
would add nothing to the security of our 
present condition, or to the certainty of our 
distant hopes. For, consider how the case 
stands without these feelings. Conscience 
attesting that the life is innocent and the 
heart sincere, Faith draws the conclusion 
that this upright heart and blameless con- 
duct is the work of the Holy Spirit of God. 
And thus, in the sensible effect of a reform- 
ed life and regenerate mind, it discovers a 
token of God's present favour. Consider, 
on the other hand, how far the case will 
be altered by the supposition of an inter- 
nal feeling of the Holy Spirit's influence. 
All that could be felt would be the effect, 
an impression on the mind. This impres- 
sion the conscience alone could feel. That 
this impression felt in the conscience should 
be from God's Spirit rather than from any 



345 



other agent, would still be a conclusion to 
be made by faith. And by what sign or 
token could faith discern between the Divine 
Spirit and another, but by those good 
works which the Divine Spirit claims as his 
proper and his constant fruits ? You see, 
therefore, that the accession of these pre- 
tended internal feelings would neither 
change the ground nor improve the cer- 
tainty of the Christian's hope. The ground 
of his hope would remain what it has been 
shown to be without them, — the conclusions 
of faith from the testimony of conscience. 
Only this difference is to be observed be- 
tween the fictitious and the real case, that 
no internal feeling, other than the conscious- 
ness of good qualities, and holy habits, and 
dispositions, could be interpreted by a true 
and unenlightened faith as a part of the 
Spirit's sanctifying influence. Because, 
the express doctrine of the Gospel being 



346 



what it is, it is no less the part of a true 
faith to disbelieve the reality of any imme- 
diate perception of the mysterious inter- 
course between God's Spirit and the human 
soul, than to embrace, with all thankfulness, 
the belief of a constant unperceived com- 
munion. For the one is denied by the 
very same authority by which the other is 
asserted. And to disbelieve what Christ 
hath denied, no less than to believe what 
he hath affirmed, is an essential part of the 
faith in Christ. 

If I have delivered myself with the per- 
spicuity at which I have aimed, you will 
be sensible that we neither abolish nor 
weaken the testimony of the Spirit by 
bringing it to rest upon the testimony of 
conscience. This does by no means re- 
duce the hopes of the Christian to what 
they might be, if the testimony of the Spirit 
were removed. To perceive this the more 



347 



clearly, make the supposition for a moment, 
that the doctrine of the Gospel being 
in all other points exactly what it is, this 
article of the Spirit's general and ordinary 
influence had been kept entirely out of 
sight ; there is no absurdity in supposing 
that God might have acted just as we are 
taught he does upon the hearts of the 
faithful, although man had never been 
made acquainted with this wonderful part 
of the scheme of his salvation. And, not- 
withstanding his ignorance in this particular, 
the good Christian would still have found 
in the favourable testimony of his con- 
science a solid ground of future hope. 
But this hope, though, perhaps not less 
firm, must have been by many degrees less 
vigorous and animating than that which 
he now derives from the belief of the Holy 
Spirit's constant operation on his heart. 
For on the supposition of his ignorance 



348 



upon this point, his conckision concerning 
his own future condition, must have been 
drawn from a persuasion af the truth of 
God s general promises, to all persons of 
that reformed character, which he might 
understand to be his own. Whereas, with 
the knowledge that he actually enjoys, his 
hopes are built on a personal experience 
of God's present goodness. You see 
therefore what gratitude we owe to God, 
both for the unspeakable gift and for the 
clear knowledge of it which he has given 
us ; which renders it to every Christian in 
the present life the private and personal 
seal of his future expectations. 

It remains for me briefly to remind you, 
that the effect of a seal in any civil con- 
tract is to fasten the conditions of the cove- 
nant upon both parties. And thus it is to 
be understood, that the seal of the Spirit, 
as it confirms the promises on the part of 



349 



God, and renders them in some measure 
personal to every one who finds the im- 
pression of this seal in the testimony of his 
conscience, so it confirms the obligation to 
a holy life, and renders it personal on the 
part of the Christian. There is a general 
obligation upon all mankind to a strict dis- 
charge of the duties of religion as far as 
they are made known to them, arising 
from their intrinsic fitness and propriety, 
and from the common relation in which 
all men stand to God, as their Creator and 
Preserver. There is a more particular ob- 
ligation upon Christians to observe the 
injunctions of their Lord, arising from the 
particular benefits and blessings of the 
Christian covenant, from the clear dis- 
covery of future rewards and punishments, 
and from the wonderful manifestation of 
the riches of God's mercy, who gave his 



350 



Son to die for us while we were enemies. 
But there is besides these general obh'ga- 
tions, — besides the obligation upon all men 
to their natural duties, upon all Christians 
to the public injunctions of their Lord, — 
there is, I say, besides, upon every true 
Christian who has tasted of the heavenly 
gift, and been made partaker of the Holy 
Ghost; who experiences in the improve- 
ment of his own mind and manners, the 
present powers of the world to come ; upon 
every such person, there is a special and 
personal obligation, to cleanse himself from 
all impurity of flesh and spirit, and to 
perfect holiness in the fear of God ; espe- 
cially to listen with a vigilant and interested 
attention to the private admonitions of 
his own conscience, which is indeed no- 
thing less than the voice of God within 
him. For as it is certain, on the one hand> 



351 



that no man has any testimony from the 
Spirit of Iiis present sanctification, no assm- 
ance of his final salvation but what is con- 
veyed to him through the conscience; so 
it is equally certain, on the other, that 
every good suggestion of the conscience 
proceeds from the Spirit of God. And 
whoever stifles these suggestions, whoever 
is not diligent to consult this internal mo- 
nitor, or reluctantly and imperfectly obeys 
him, grieves the Spirit whose oracle he is. 
And the danger is, that the Spirit will be 
quenched, that those assistances will be 
withdrawn which negligence and perverse- 
ness render ineffectual and useless. For 
God's grace is given to help the infirmities 
of the upright and sincere, but it will not 
forcibly reclaim the refractory or the 
thoughtless. " Give therefore all dili- 
" gence to make your calling and election 



" sure For this shall efFectuallj secure 
" your admission into the everlasting king- 
" dom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
" Christ. To whom," &c. 



FINIS. 



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